More Part-Time Managers and Co-CEOs Could Narrow Australia's Gender Pay Gap

Australia's Workplace Gender Equality Agency says more part-time management roles and co-chief executives sharing the top job could keep women in leadership and narrow the country's gender pay gap.

The assessment was published on 12 October 2026 and draws on joint research by the agency and Curtin University covering 5.4 million employees. Women in Australia earn $0.79 on average for every $1 earned by men, according to that analysis. The Guardian

Promotion is not the bottleneck. In 2024-25, full-time women in Australia were promoted more often than men. Retention is. Women in management resigned at a rate of 13.8%, compared with 12% for men. Like a pipe that leaks after the intake, women reach senior posts and then leave.

WGEA chief executive Christine Castley said uneven caring responsibilities and lack of flexible work options prevented women staying in senior positions. She said job-sharing at the top, with co-CEOs splitting the CEO role, was increasingly seen, including at CEO level.

Only 13.2% of organisations designed management roles for part-time work. Organisations that did so recorded significantly higher promotion rates for female part-time non-managers. Employers with flexible work strategies employed more women at every level of senior management.

Senior roles remain unevenly shared. Women accounted for one in five board chairs or chief executives. In health care and social assistance, women made up three-quarters of the workforce but held about half of CEO positions.

Care patterns tracked closely with that attrition. Women accounted for 80% of people taking primary carer parental leave in Australia in 2024-25. The WGEA-Curtin report found 33% of employers were not funding additional paid parental leave.

Earlier pay-gap readings provide context. Australia's national total remuneration gender pay gap, which covers all pay including bonuses, was 21.7% in 2023, as reported in November of that year. WGEA's pay-gap data page lists the private-sector total remuneration average gender pay gap at 21.1%. WGEA In March 2026, ABC reported the national gender pay gap was 11.2%, down 0.9 percentage points from the previous year. ABC News Separate ABC reporting in October 2025 found that by their 50s, female bosses earned $85,600 less on average than male managers.

The broader context here is a shift from pipeline explanations to structural design. For specialists who track labour-market equity, the finding that full-time women outpace men on promotions reframes the problem around role architecture and exit. Part-time management and formal job-shares at chief-executive level alter spans of control, accountability lines and succession planning. They also test investor and board tolerance for shared authority.

Looking at what this means for employers, the leverage points identified are concrete. Designing management posts as part-time capable, maintaining flexible work strategies through senior bands, and funding employer-paid parental leave address the points where the data locates attrition. Whether boards expand co-CEO models beyond isolated cases will indicate how far that redesign extends.