By Alasdair Pal and Christine Chen

SYDNEY, March 4 (Reuters) - Australia's gender pay gap has narrowed slightly but women are still paid nearly a fifth less than men, with the finance, mining and construction industries showing the biggest differences, a government report found.

The Workplace Gender Equality Agency survey also showed that 72.2% of employers had a gap favouring men while 21.3% had a gap within the target range of +/-5%. The rest had a gap that favoured women.

The median pay gap for the year to March 2024 was 18.6% in favour of men, compared with 19% in the previous year. Some 56% of companies reduced their pay gaps.

"Where an employer's gender pay gap is beyond the target range of +/-5%, it indicates one gender is more likely to be over-represented in higher paying roles compared to the other," the agency's Chief Executive Mary Wooldridge said.

Large listed companies with big pay gaps in favour of men included the country's top investment bank Macquarie Group MQG.AX with a gap of 41.8% and gas producer Woodside WDS.AX with a gap of 25.6%. Woodside showed an improvement from 30.2% a year earlier while data was not collated for Macquarie previously.

The large gaps remain despite both companies having female chief executives.

Asked about the gap, Macquarie CEO Shemara Wikramanayake said the firm did not want to push female employees into senior roles before they were ready.

"It's going to take as long as it's going to take," she told the Australian Financial Review Business Summit on Tuesday.

"We're not going to force females into senior roles. I think that would be counterproductive."

Woodside CEO Meg O'Neill said the firm's hiring had been gender balanced for several years.

"The size of the workforce is so large... it's going to take time for those women to get into the workforce, to work their way up to positions of greater seniority," she told the same conference.

Thomson Reuters (Professional) Australia, the local subsidiary of Reuters' parent company Thomson Reuters TRI.TO, reported a median pay gap of 25% in favour of men, a 3.5 percentage point improvement on the previous year.

A spokesperson for Thomson Reuters said the gap was a result of greater gender imbalance at both the lower and senior levels of the company.

Australia passed legislation mandating the reporting of gender pay gaps for companies with more than 100 employees in 2023, following other countries including the United Kingdom that have mandatory reporting.

(Reporting by Alasdair Pal and Christine Chen in Sydney; Editing by Edwina Gibbs)

((Alasdair.Pal@thomsonreuters.com; +61 291 717 228; Reuters Messaging: alasdair.pal.reuters.com@reuters.net))