The Workplace Gender Equality Agency (WGEA) today releases a full list of employers and their gender pay gaps. Look yourself up! What's it showing? Well, you could have knocked me down with a $5 note. There is not one sector in Australia with pay equality.

Already the list of employer excuses is expanding - already a long list. Hard to get radiologists. Hard to get engineers. And, allegedly, it must be so hard to promote talented women in banking to make pay fair. Plus, kill me, how about the employers who must have missed the legislation which now demands publication of the gaps and go all weak-kneed when they discover their embarrassments are now public.

The good news is that name and shame (N&S), the brutal colloquialism for what just happened to companies all over Australia, works. WGEA chief executive Mary Wooldridge says when N&S (accurate name for transparency and accountability) was implemented in the UK it led to the gender wage gap shrinking. She's confident it will work here, too. Wooldridge is very diplomatic about the amount of work her team has to do to get companies on board with the process. I'm guessing there will be even more work to do once they all see how they line up against each other.

In the meantime, we have to rely on women-led companies to lead the way on pay equity. And that, says Sydney University academic Rae Cooper, is largely dependent on the highly feminised sectors in which they work. There is, she says, some evidence from other economies that better representation of women in management and senior leadership is linked to less gender-based discrimination and that workplace policies, employment practices, and pay are more gender-equitable.

Perhaps those leaders might be mothers themselves and know it's possible to do more than one thing at once? Women know this about themselves already.

Cooper says there are lower gender pay gaps where pay is primarily set by awards and agreements (say hospo, early childhood care) and higher in areas where individualised and discretionary pay systems dominate (like finance and investment). Honestly, why isn't everyone in banking a member of the Finance Sector Union? And what's the female equivalent of a big swinging dick?

There is no like-for-like but it does reveal there are more highly-paid men in any sector than highly-paid women. Why is that? I'm guessing employers think of us as uteri on legs, soon to be procreating wildly and therefore on the mummy track and utterly unreliable. The kind name for this is unconscious bias. The real name is sexism and I don't for one minute believe it's unconscious.

It is not enough to punish those with gaps of 10 per cent or more. Force those companies with big gender pay gaps to fully fund university and TAFE scholarships for women. Make them take those women on straight after the completion of their degrees. Two-year paid gigs at the minimum. As for medicine, take a good, long look at your various specialist programs and pull yourselves together. Part-time. Full-time. As it is, you are struggling to fill the demand Australia has for doctors.

There's one other cure which will take place over the next 20 years. The bias which ignores the ambitions and talents of mothers will no longer be possible as Australia moves to an epoch where childless households outnumber households with children. When you hire those women, they will be footloose and fancy-free. Until their parents need support. By the time they are ensconced in their jobs and doing brilliantly, employers will no longer be able to use the excuse they all use.

She really didn't want that promotion.

Believe me. She did.