JamesH I am surpried that 67% of wage earners earn less than the average wage. The statistical measure that you are looking for is MEDIAN which indicates that half the population earns below this amount and half the population earns above this amount. The median adult income is about $28,000.

Given our illustrious leader's determination to push efficiency cuts through all realms of the public service ABS surveys are no longer worth the paper they are written on. How can you claim an unemployment rate of 4% when there are 980,000 people receiving Newstart allowance in a workforce of 10,000,000 people.

I concede that some industries structure their jobs with expectations of impossibly long hour that preclude workers from any sense of work life balance and these long hours discourage women from participating. And lets not forget that old fashioned sex discrimination is still rampant in our society where the high paid jobs are reserved for the boys.

Couple of thoughts to a few recent posts:

1. If a CEO is working umpteen hours a week, the CEO is being handsomly paid for it. I know plenty of humble folk slaving away at the bottom of the stack and overtime being ignored; or the worker even chastised for doing it. (I'd like to know where the Unions are hiding these days).

2. Men might work longer hours to attain the top jobs - but who is supporting them in every facet of their lives, including taking care of personal and social responsibilities and the kiddies, to enable that. This is just usual - a long history of devaluing, patronizing or totaly ignoring the contribution of homemaking (traditionally a female's allocation) and social connection activities, to the overall functioning of the system. As a society maybe we need to be honest about the value of these things and reorder some of our individual priorities.

3. Many people I know in higher paying jobs got there through political expertise, not industriousness. Some of them are the laziest people I've met. The people in "top jobs" are over esteemed.

Pynchme,
The majority of women prefer to work few hours or prefer no paid work at all, and this even occurs when they have NO DEPENDANT CHILDREN. That has been proven in one survey after another.

The taxpayer funded Eva Cox’s of this world refuse to acknowledge those surveys and will rarely mention them, and how they remain in their pampered jobs in universities is only because of the feminist, male-hating, sexist and discriminatory nature of those universities.

Bille you point an interesting fact that there are different ways of calculating "the average". Depending on what you want to show, depends on what method you will use.

The Federal government managed to reduce unemployment, not by job creation, but by changing the way unemployment was calculated. Simple.

For example if the average wage is 50,000, but then using a bar graph to demonstrate the numbers of workers who earn certain income ranges. The largest group would be (my assumption) would be around 45-40,000 income range. It only takes a small number of high income earners to distort the 'average' particularly when they are earning millions of dollars.

As more women move into this higher income bracket, then the average income for women will also increase, even though the income for the vast majority did not increase by much.

HRS,

Your hatred of women blinds you to the obvious.

Whether there are such surveys or not (post a link
so I can reflect on some, if there are any) - women
have always worked - mostly unrecognized and mostly
unpaid or poorly paid; BUT that doesn't mean that the
only valuable work is work that is paid.

That women do most of the work that is poorly valued
economically says more about how women are valued than
about the work per se. If you want to read some
interesting research, look at how jobs that were
traditionally female dominated soon attracted wage
increases once men started working in them - for
example, nursing and teaching.

Now that women are saying ok - let's go for work that
has some market value so that we don't have to rely
on the good graces of some bloke or other; hear all
the whinging (such as from, for example, yourself)
about men being required to manage their own personal
care instead of having a female waiting on them hand
and foot.

Women continue to do most of the care work btw - saving
you all money in your economic figuring of things that
are valuable.

< If you want to read some
interesting research, look at how jobs that were
traditionally female dominated soon attracted wage
increases once men started working in them - for
example, nursing and teaching.> Pynchme

Pynchme, it is my understanding the number of male teachers has been in decline over a few decades and that if teachers salaries had kept up with the same level of pay as for example the 1960's then teachers would be on salaries of around 100k.

So what came first? Did the decline in salaries result in men not seeing teaching as a career option or is the decline in the numbers of male teachers resulting in a decline in salaries?

I don't think it is as cut and dried as that, as there are many other factors at play, apart from salary.

Also all governments want to save as much money as possible in paying public servants like teachers and nurses. For example a nurse working agency can earn around $90 per hour. So why do not salaries reflect this?

It is about budgets.