People

At MECCA, we welcome any initiatives that will fast track action to address gender inequality, which is the biggest inequality of all.

It matters to us because we are a significant employer of women - in fact 95% of our team members are women. More than 71% of our senior leadership roles (C-Suite/ General Manager/ Head of) are filled by women, and our Founder and co-CEO is a woman.

In addition, in 2022, to mark 25 years of MECCA, we committed $25 million over five years to tackling gender inequality through our social change initiative, M-POWER.

Therefore, we’re supportive of the Australian Government’s Workplace Gender Equality Agency (WGEA) releasing gender pay gap (GPG) data to help raise awareness of the systemic factors that contribute to this gap in Australia.

MECCA’s gender pay data

The GPG is different to equal pay for equal work (women and men being paid the same for performing the same role or different work of equal or comparable value). This has been the law in Australia for many years and MECCA has a range of practices in place to ensure equal pay for equal roles.

The GPG is the difference in average or median earnings between women and men in the workforce.

As at 31 March 2023, 82% of our team worked in stores, and 98% of those team members were women. We have no gender pay gap across our store teams.

The salaries of retail team members are set by the Retail Award, and MECCA’s policy is to pay at or above the award rates. Nonetheless, the average salary of retail team members is lower than the average salary for Support Centre team members working in different functions and disciplines.

For our senior leadership roles (C-Suite, General Manager/ Head of), of which 71% are filled by women, we have a GPG of -9.5% (a pay gap in favour of women).

Of the 5% of men who work at MECCA, 49% work at our Support Centre and most work in our technology team (65%).

We’re proud of the fact that we have a significant number of women working in our digital and technology teams (87% and 35% respectively).

However, as we expanded our investments in digital and technology, both during and post the COVID pandemic, we have found that the local market for technology roles is very competitive and that the candidates for certain roles were almost all men.

Given the high proportion of women in our stores teams and because the small number of men who work at MECCA are in positions that attract higher-than-average wages, our median total remuneration was 10.3% in favour of men and our median base salary was 8.9% in favour of men during the reporting period (1 April 2022 to 31 March 2023).

Clearly, this gap is unacceptable, and our aim is for these numbers to be as close to zero as possible.

To that end, we’re investing in retaining and developing women at MECCA who are working in, or interested in, STEM-related roles, as well as finding ways we can increase the number of women applying for these positions.

In addition, through our M-POWER program, we’re collaborating with Skyline Education Foundation, a not-for-profit that supports high achieving girls from disadvantaged backgrounds to complete secondary school.

In the coming months, we’ll launch what we hope will become a multi-year program, in which we will have two to three Skyline alumni join our digital and technology teams annually. We will support them to upskill, and we’ll provide additional support such as a mentoring and buddy program to ensure they thrive at MECCA.

Careers at MECCA

We want retail to be more than a holiday job – we want our team members to have long and thriving careers at MECCA. Our graduate program is exclusively available to our team members working in stores, the Distribution Centre or Customer Care. Fifty of our ~300 retail leaders started their careers as store hosts or specialists at MECCA, and almost 100 store team members have been promoted to roles at Support Centre in the past two years.

Our investment in team member education goes beyond training on products, brands and customer engagement, and includes personal wellbeing, financial literacy, mindfulness and resilience, and diversity and inclusion.

As part of ensuring that our practices and policies promote gender equality at MECCA, we comprehensively review data as part of our annual pay review process for all team member groups to ensure that there is no gender difference in the allocation of ratings, bonuses and salary increases.