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Gender Equality: benchmarks & trends
Gender Equality: Benchmarks & Trends
According to McKinsey Global Institute, gender diverse companies are likely to perform 15% better, so it makes sense that gender equality and company and industry composition is a metric worth reviewing for all businesses. In the past even if organisations had their own internal gender diversity and equality strategies it was challenging to implement meaningful KPIs as industry benchmarks were not readily available.
The Workplace Gender Equality Agency (WGEA) has changed this, with all Australian businesses that employ more than 100 people required to report on their gender statistics. The latest report from the WGEA was published this week with findings and comparisons for the last 5 years of data available.
So how does your business, your industry stack up?
The results shine a light on some interesting trends, with a new data tool available meaning you can compare industries, and even individual organisations in terms of their gender equality performance.
Low pay gap industries
Though the gender pay gap has reduced over the last 5 years from 24.7% to 21.3% a few standout industries are performing significantly better than this; with Tertiary Education and the Public Sector with just 10.7% and 4.9% pay gap respectively.
Higher prevalence of gender equality policy, structures and strategies
The most common gender equality strategy for businesses in an employee lifecycle has always been at the point of recruitment; this trend continues with almost 83% of companies reporting a formal policy or strategy for gender equality during the recruitment process.
The report identified that more than 60% of business have implemented gender equality strategies in the talent identification and succession planning , which represents an increase of over 18% in the last 5 years.
However, there is still work to be done, with only 31.4% of employers confirming they have formal KPIs in place.
Increased women in leadership positions
The data showed an overall increase in the percentage of leadership roles held by women across all leadership categories, however the top dog positions saw the smallest improvement with just 1.4% increase in CEO and equivalent positions held by women. Females increased in other management categories as follows:
- Key Management personnel increased by 4.4%
- Senior Managers increased by 3.5%
- Executives and general managers increased by 3.5%
- Other managers increased by 2.5%
- CEOs saw a 1.4% increase
Some interesting stats:
- Women are paid $25K less than men
- Gender pay gap has consistently reduced since 2013/14
- In 2013 the gap was just under 25%, and in 2018 the reported gap was 21.3%
- Gender pay gaps still exist across all industries, management categories and occupations
- Information Media and Telecommunications industry saw reduction in female participation
- More than 70% of business offer flexible work arrangements
Need help getting started with your gender agenda?
The first step is to measure your status quo, before setting targets and tracking your achievements towards these goals. Focus your efforts on what is most important to your business – you can’t do everything – so pick three or four primary goals and develop strategies and look at appropriate intervention points, most commonly:
- Recruitment
- Training and Development
- Performance management
- Promotions
Your goals can be simply to implement or improve a policy or formal structure, with either total business KPIs or targeted KPIs for your management team before communicating the current status of your business and the overarching business goals the KPIs support.
What’s important is to formalise your approach and communicate it, educating your team to get them engaged at each stage.
Talk to one of our team for a complimentary consultation for your gender equality business review. Call us on 9629 9999
Find the WGEA Data Explorer tool here.
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