PM Julia Gillard says reports of an increasing gender pay gap are concerning despite claims the statistics weren't portrayed accurately.

The Workplace Gender Equality Agency (WGEA) says the gender pay gap for young university graduates more than doubled last year, from $2000 to $5000 a year.



However, Graduate Careers Australia (GCA) on Friday told media the federal government agency had oversimplified the data, resulting in the misrepresentation of gender pay differences and that the gap remained at three per cent.



Ms Gillard on Saturday said she had seen the media reports that said the way in which those statistics were used weren't 100 per cent accurate.



"So I'm going to need to drill down to the very specific statistics here,'' she told ABC News 24.



"But any gender pay gap concerns me, whether it's for graduates or people who have been in the workforce for a long time."



Ms Gillard said her government had already acted to make a difference to gender pay inequality.



"The industrial relations system we have now has a principle at its centre, which is that women and what is viewed as women's work traditionally should not be the subject of lower pay rates," she said.



"We haven't just enacted a bill about it. We've actually put our money where it should be with around a $2 billion investment to deal with the long-term disadvantage that social and community services workers are faced (with), basically, because they tend to be women."

Ms Gillard's comments come after Graduate Careers Australia (GCA) said today that a federal government agency has oversimplified data about graduate pay, resulting in the misrepresentation of gender pay differences.

The Workplace Gender Equality Agency (WGEA) said the gender pay gap for young university graduates had more than doubled last year, from $2000 to $5000 a year. However, there was in fact no change and the gap remains at three per cent.

GCA policy and strategy adviser Bruce Guthrie said the agency had read data from its annual Australian Graduate Survey in a "overly simplistic" way.

"The researcher in question has missed some vital paragraphs in this fairly short document which would have explained a lot of the stuff we have had to clarify.

"It does happen. It's happened before, it will happen again with various data sets. People get the wrong handle and think the story is simpler than it actually is," Mr Guthrie said.

Mr Guthrie was concerned the misrepresentation could cloud the thinking of school leavers as they make career choices.

He said a factor that contributed to the misrepresentation was that men tended to be over-represented in fields such as engineering.

"In addition, some of the larger wage gaps are observed in fields with relatively low response numbers, for example dentistry and optometry, which could make them unreliable."

The gender equality agency identified a disparity of $14,000, or 15.7 per cent, between female and male dentistry graduates.

"I think it's really unlikely there is any responsible graduate recruiter in Australia who is paying a different salary to males and females," Mr Guthrie said.

"I don't believe that would be the case."

Mr Guthrie said GCA was entirely supportive of the need for workplace equality and the misreading of the information had painted employers as discriminatory.

The GCA figures that were used are based on the responses of new bachelor-degree graduates younger than 25 in their first full-time employment and do not represent the wider Australian workforce.

Originally published as PM: 'Any gender pay gap concerns me'