PaperCut Software remains committed to progress in gender equality and specifically fostering a workplace where all individuals, regardless of gender, have equal opportunities to thrive. Given our industry sector (Tech, IT, Software and Print) we are also aware that our actions support girls and women more broadly in the communities in which we participate, where they are under-represented.
Results review
PaperCut has taken positive action in the gender equity space in the reporting period and in the last 12 months, and has seen improvements in a number of areas. However, for the reasons outlined below, this has not translated to organisational-level pay equity improvements in that reporting period.
On the key gender pay gap measures PaperCut’s performance has declined in average total remuneration; median total remuneration; and average base salary. This is due to three key reasons:
- **PaperCut has not significantly improved its representation of women in senior roles.
**Specifically, representation of women in Manager roles dropped from 27.8% to 17.4% in the reporting period. This is because:
a. For two consecutive reporting periods, only two men were promoted to management roles.
b. With five manager-level roles being recruited, all positions were awarded to male candidates. - The decreasing representation of women in senior roles has increased the average gender pay gap due to the higher proportion of men in more senior roles with average higher earnings.
- Including the remuneration of our male CEO/Founder in the reporting period.
The areas of progress in addressing gender equity at PaperCut were:
- Promotion Equity - In the 2023 reporting period in the non-manager cohort, 4% of women and 8% of men were promoted. In the 2024 reporting period we narrowed the gender disparity in non-manager promotions substantially with 11.3% of women and 11.8% of men being promoted.
- Pay equity in annual increases - we assigned a dedicated budget to address gender-based salary discrepancies in like-for-like roles, resulting in Australian women receiving an average 1.87% higher increase than men in the reporting period compared to receiving less on average the prior year.
- Training - One of our commitments from our last reporting period was to ‘Run unconscious bias training with a gender element’. This was rolled out globally for all managers and knowledge leaders.
In closing
While our progress on some equity measures are important, we acknowledge that the gender pay gap will persist and worsen if we do not improve the underrepresentation of women in senior leadership positions at PaperCut. We do note we have particularly challenging industry intersectional dynamics of print plus software industry and the over-representation of men with industry knowledge in our candidate pool. We remain committed to our current programs of supporting women to progress internally at PaperCut:
- Continued gender analysis and funding for gender pay gap increases
- Training - for example for manager cohorts; or to support women
- Interview process representations
- Time and funding for programs to support and elevate women
- Strategic prioritisation of supporting women at PaperCut
We remain committed to a multi-year, consistent and sustained effort and programs in order to improve our pay-equity position.
