PRIORITIES
- Develop women’s leadership through implementing reporting requirements and action plans to counter negative attitudes to women, as outlined in Working for Women, including schools based community based programs.
- Support commitment by the new Parliament at the start of the first sitting to make gender equality a priority. Establish institutional arrangements for advancing gender equity across parliament, such as specialised parliamentary women’s caucuses and parliamentary standing committees that review legislation, hold hearings and conduct other official parliamentary functions. These arrangements should include relevant advisory expertise, along the lines of the specialist panels established for Fair Work Australia.
- Commit to ongoing funding for programs to encourage women across the political spectrum to run for public office at local, state and federal levels, as provided by Working for Women.
- Commit to amending the WGEA act to lower the threshold for companies and public sector entities from 100 to 50 employees to report against all the gender equality indicators. Small and medium-sized businesses must be supported to meet those new reporting obligations.
- Legislate to require organisations with 500 or more employees in Australia to commit to achieve—or, at a minimum, improve on—measurable targets to progress gender equality in their workplaces.
RATIONALE
The 2024 Status of Women Report card showed that:
- One in three (34.8%) Australians hold a negative bias about women’s ability to participate fully - economically, politically or in education
- Attitudes towards gender equality are not more progressive in younger Australians (16 – 24 years) than the Australian average
- 43% of young women (16 – 24 years) reject attitudes that underpin gender inequality compared to 20% of young men
- In couple families where the youngest dependent is 0-4 years old, 90.6% of male partners were employed compared to 69.5% of females
- Women are less likely than men to hold traditional attitudes towards parenting and work, and show more support for female-breadwinning family models than men.
The report of the Women’s Economic Equality Taskforce recommended that the Federal Government:
- invest in programs to address community attitudes and bias that prevent women’s full economic participation across a lifetime
- implement and resource the National Strategy to Achieve Gender Equality, ensuring community attitudes and biases are addressed, through evidence-based practice, at both a whole-of-population, community and industry level
- build a comprehensive research agenda to inform normative change and measure progress.
The report also found that gender equality will benefit all Australians. It states: ‘Outdated systems, policies and norms discount over 50% of our population. This means we are underutilising the economic potential of more than 50% of our community......We could add $128 billion to the economy through boosting women’s workforce participation and productivity growth if we tackle the factors holding women back’.
There has been some progress in female representation in the political arena. In 2022, at the opening of the 47th parliament:
- 44% of federal parliamentarians were women, up from 26% in 2002
- 38% of total filled seats in the House of Representatives were women, up from 25% in 2002
- 57% of total filled seats in the Senate were women, up from 28% in 2002.
- 4.4% of federal parliamentarians are Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, up from 0.4% on the parliamentary opening date in 2002
According to a 2022 analysis by the Parliamentary Library, 4.4% of federal parliamentarians identified as LGBTIQA+, up from 0.9% in 2002.
The picture is mixed. Women are underrepresented in seven of Australia’s nine parliaments. Only in the ACT are there more women than men: 14 to 11. Victoria has exact gender parity: 64 each. In the Queensland Parliament, women are outnumbered more than two to one.
Across the nine Australian parliaments, there are equal or more women than men in only two parties: the Labor Party (50% women) and the Greens (63% women). The community independents, mostly women, were very successful at the 2022 federal election – but across Australia as a whole most independents are men, as are most minor party parliamentarians.
WEL notes that though the share of female Liberal politicians has increased by 9% from 2015 to 2025 from 22% to 31%, in raw numbers there are currently fewer female Liberal parliamentarians: 71 in 2024 compared to 79 in 2015. The apparent improvement is a result of the collapse in the number of male Liberal parliamentarians, from 274 to 157 over the same period.
The Australian Local Government Women’s Association reports that women represent more than four out of every ten elected councillors across Australia. Women’s representation is uneven and has remained static or even fallen in some States.
Federal Government funding is currently provided to Women for Election Australia, under Working for Women, to improve gender equality and diversity in politics. This equips and encourages women across the political spectrum to run for public office at local, state and federal levels. WEL supports the continuation of this funding.
Women also continue to be underrepresented in leadership positions in business, representing only 22% of CEOs. Women hold 20% of chair positions and 32% of board member positions. One in four organisations have no women board members.
Research has identified a relationship between increasing the proportion of women in the most senior levels and higher company performance, productivity and profitability. It might be expected that more women in senior positions would assist in reducing the current large pay gap between men and women: the gender pay gap is currently 21.1% as reported by WGEA and represents an estimated cost of $51.8 billion a year to the Australian economy.
Setting targets with actions to overcome barriers to women’s representation across the organisation and in senior leadership positions is an approach that can promote accountability, transparency and organisational confidence. The research indicates that taking this kind of data-driven approach is in itself a mechanism for change.
The Workplace Gender Equality Amendment (Setting Gender Equality Targets) Bill is currently in the Senate and should be supported. The Bill would introduce a world-first target scheme to accelerate action on gender equality by large Australian employers. It will require organisations with 500 or more employees in Australia to commit to achieve—or, at a minimum, improve on—measurable targets to progress gender equality in their workplaces.
WEL believes that the act of requiring business to take targeted action will drive a shift in behaviour by embedding practices that are likely to create positive and lasting cultural change in workplaces.
The current threshold for reporting to WGEA against all the gender equality indicators is companies with 100 employees or more. WEL advocates reducing this threshold to companies with more than 50 employees. Small and medium-sized businesses must be supported to meet those new reporting obligations.
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