SAGE subscribers have shown they have an edge when it comes to closing the Gender Pay Gap: they’re reducing the gap faster than their peer organisations across the education and research sector.
The 2025 gender pay gap data was published today by the Workplace Gender Equality Agency.
The data shows SAGE organisations are reducing the gap faster both in universities and in medical research institutes
This repeats last year’s success: it’s the second year in a row that we have seen lower gender pay gaps for SAGE subscribers.
But the news isn’t all good for the sector
Universities and medical institutions who are not participating in SAGE have, on average, increased their gender pay gap – meaning they’re not just going more slowly, they’re actually going backwards.
How big are the median pay gaps in our sector?
However, medical research has a very wide range of pay gaps, from –52.9n (a gap in favour of women) to 26.5% at another (a very large gap in in favour of men).
Large gaps show that most medical research institutes are still struggling, across the board.
Universities have gender pay gaps ranging from 0.9% to 19.%.
Celebrating institutions that are closing their gaps
Some SAGE institutions deserve to be congratulated on their progress for the last 12 months, with some big changes in pay gaps:
- The Burnet Institute: a (huge) reduction of 9.5 percentage points
- University of Technology Sydney: a reduction of 8.1 percentage points
- Australian Catholic University: a reduction of 7.6 percentage points
Now we can see the whole picture
The inclusion of CEO pay in the data sets means that 2025 marks the first time WGEA has published average employer gender pay gaps.
This is a good measure of the collective difference in the remuneration of a group, as it is skewed by high and low salaries.
We can now compare this data to the median pay gaps, which give a good picture of typical earnings within an organisation.
The fact that average gender pay gaps are generally higher than median gender pay gaps in higher education and research indicates that as remuneration increases, the gender pay gap also increases (ie, those well-paid positions are more disproportionately held by men)..
Average total remuneration is a new measure that has been introduced this year. From now on, we’ll be able to also track changes to the average gender pay gap in each organisation.
