This is an interesting and timely book, given the obligation in the UK for large organizations to publish their (admittedly skimpy) gender pay gap data, and the prevalence in the media of stories about women in the media and elsewhere being paid less than colleagues. The book is a collection of papers by Australian academics on gender gaps in employment and pay, integrated by a common analytic framework set out in the initial chapters. The editors state that their objective is to ‘help reshape international thinking’ on gender gaps (p.vii). An ambitious aim indeed, but one that I think can be justified. Although the analysis and case studies in the book focus on the Australian context, international comparisons are included; and reading the book from a UK perspective the parallels are striking.

The book is divided into two sections: ‘concepts’ and ‘occupations’. The five chapters in the first section discuss the analytic categories that are utilised in a set of occupational case studies in the second section. The initial chapter by David Peetz sets out the stall for the main contribution of the book, which is to introduce into the notions of labour segmentation and domestic labour divisions that are seen to underlie gender gaps a new category of ‘regulation distance’. The argument is that, where labour regulation is strong, as is characteristic in tightly controlled and rule-bound public-sector organizations and where trade unions and collective bargaining set pay levels, gender gaps are likely to be diminished; at the other end of the scale where regulation is low and market forces are dominant, gaps are likely to be increased because of the normative practices of patriarchal capitalism. This would explain, for example, why in the UK university sector, pay gaps are most marked among the professoriate, where pay levels are open to market negotiation.

Of course this distinction alone will not explain the nature of gender pay gaps or gender employment rates, and a virtue of the book is that it persistently highlights complexity, and stresses the importance of occupational divisions and organizational cultures, as explored in the case studies in Part 2. As Gillian Whitehouse remarks in a particularly fascinating chapter on cross-national comparisons:

Whitehouse draws on OECD data from 2000 and 2013 to illustrate these differential effects. While there is a general trend of diminishing gender pay gaps over this time period, national differences are marked. Predictably, Nordic countries, especially Norway and Denmark, show low pay gaps, along with New Zealand, while the gaps are very large in Japan and Korea. Interestingly Greece, Italy and Spain also demonstrate low gender pay gaps although these are countries with highly gender-segmented labour markets, and indeed with low employment rates for women. This is an indication of the importance of occupational analysis, for class is strongly implicated in these effects. This is also highlighted in a particular interesting table (p. 111) which shows the distribution of gender pay gaps for the 10^th median and 90^th wage percentiles. The trend is for higher gaps in the top percentile (which relates to the argument about market forces); but a number of countries show considerable pay gaps in the lowest decile, including the UK, which reflects the lower valuation of jobs held by working-class women as compared to working-class men. In Norway there is virtually no pay gap at this wage level.

Of course aggregate data of this kind conceals a lot of variations, which is why the editors and authors focus so strongly on occupations as a field of analysis, The case studies are chosen to cover a range of situations, from Delaney's study of ‘invisibilised’ and unregulated homeworkers, to high-paid film directors and CEOs. As well as illustrating the impacts of regulation distance, gender segregation and domestic responsibilities, these chapters show the persistence of male dominance and norms which privilege male workers. Thus, Murray, Peetz and Muurlink's study of Queensland mining workers shows that while women in the industry are among the best paid industrial workers they suffer from harassment by male co-workers and are kept out of the best paid jobs. Coles and McNeill chart how old boys’ networks in the film and television industries ensure that the highest value projects are entrusted to male directors (though it is heartening to read that the British film industry, along with the Australian, is the international leader in promoting diversity among film-makers). Following the argument that distance from regulation and closeness to market forces promote larger pay gaps, Peetz, Murray and Poorhosseinzadeh focus on norms which influence pay among high earners in the private sector: the association of women with domestic work, the stereotypes of the macho ‘ideal manager’ able to work long hours, men's higher evaluation of their own worth and, in particular, their possession of greater social capital and networks of ‘homosociality’. These factors operate in academia as well and British readers will find much that is familiar in the chapter on Australian academics, which also emphasises the role of bonus or ‘merit’ payments being awarded mainly to men.

One criticism that might be aimed at this project is that it has little to say about intersections of gender with ethnicity, age, disability and so forth. But some of those may be hinted at in the concluding chapter, which touches on the political: while egalitarian regulation and values have been spreading, the rise of the new right and the utterances of powerful leaders may have given more legitimacy to racism and sexism. Moreover the neoliberal ethos has had other impacts that help gender gaps to persist; the managerial fostering of long hours’ cultures, the attacks on trade unions and the erosion of public sector employment where regulation is high and gender gaps are lower. These political impacts are also explored in a chapter by Heidi Gottfried, which points to the switch from ‘collective rights to individual obligations’ (p. 56). Thus gender gaps are set to persist: this book should be essential reading for those interested in their abolition.