By Niki Vincent
You can’t manage what you don’t measure and you can’t fix what you can’t see.
And what is clear for everyone to see reading the results of Australia’s first gender equality audit in the public sector is that women have a long way to go to achieve genuine equality.
No surprise there, but for the first time we now have the most comprehensive data on which to make evidence-based decisions to finally fix the problem.
Around 300 of Victoria’s public sector organisations employing more than 450,000 workers in total participated in Australia’s first mandatory workplace gender equality audit.
Under the landmark Gender Equality Act, all state government departments and authorities, emergency services, councils and universities must measure workplace gender inequality to make improvements.
The report we released this week found that the average pay gap between men and women was 15.6%.
Women’s participation in the paid Victorian workforce increased substantially over the past 5 decades, rising from 43.8% in 1978 to 62.3% in June 2022.
These findings are captured in our Baseline report, which also found:
- Women were significantly overrepresented in part-time and casual work, with 42% of women working part time, compared to 15% of men.
- More than three-quarters of workers using formal flexible work arrangements were women.
- Almost 8 out of 10 parental leave takers were women, and their leave lasted an average of 8 times longer than men’s.
- Women were 50% more likely to say they experienced sexual harassment than men but they rarely made a formal complaint about this. Sexual harassment occurred most frequently in majority-men and frontline sectors, such as transport and police and emergency services.
- The gender composition of governing bodies across defined entities overall was largely balanced between women and men. Victorian Government targets in place since 2015 requiring 50% of new government board appointments to be women have been successful in generating greater gender balance in public boards in Victoria.
The audit results for every organisation have been published on our publicly accessible portal and while I am sure this has caused some discomfort, the aim is not to name and shame but to make each organisation publicly accountable for making progress towards equality.
The fact that more than 97% of workplace gender audits are compliant, and 100% of the gender equality action plans are compliant proves there is a real commitment and that change is in the air.
Despite some men claiming they are more likely to be discriminated against in promotions, men still make up the majority in leadership. Despite women making up 66% of employees in the public sector workforce, they make up only 45% of those in senior leadership roles and more than 3 in 5 chief executives were men.
The baseline report shows Victoria’s public sector organisations are performing well in comparison to the private sector in some areas – and while there is still much progress to be made, there is a real appetite for change.
Addressing workplace gender inequality will lead to improved outcomes for women’s economic security, workforce participation and health and wellbeing, as well as overall national growth and economic productivity.
But this is more than simply reporting data. Organisations must now act on the information by implementing Gender Equality Action Plans and reporting on their progress every two years.
I am proud to say we now have more transparency than ever before to understand the state and nature of gender inequality impacting a large component of Victoria’s workforce and I am confident that Victoria will continue to lead by example in addressing the systemic drivers of gender inequality within the workforce.
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This post was previously published on Broad Agenda.
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Photo credit: iStock
Perhaps one of the best explanations for the gender pay gap was written by Kerby Anderson. He wrote that The Wall Street Journal “summarized a study done by Harvard economists of the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority. It provided a perfect test case since it is a union shop with uniform hourly wages in which men and women adhere to the same rules and thus enjoy the same benefits. Workers are promoted based on seniority, not performance. Men and women have the same option for scheduling, routes, vacation, and overtime. The rules and regulations made it nearly impossible for bias, sexism,… Read more »
I hear discussions about gender equality and the pay gap, but why don’t people talk about the dangers of the workplace and the fact that way more men die on the job than women? At one time, I saw the numbers were for every 100 females who die on the job; there are 1,294 males who die on the job. That’s more than 10 times!