- Published:
- Wednesday, 21 June 2023 at 2:09 pm
We want to be a fair and equitable workplace where women and gender diverse employees feel they are equally connected, engaged and have access to equal opportunities.
Conducting a workplace gender audit helps us to do this, by identifying gender-based workplace trends and being accountable to our staff and wider community about how we are working to address them.
Our responsibility under the Gender Equality Act 2020
Under the Gender Equality Act 2020 we are also required to take positive action towards achieving workplace gender equality and report our progress to the Commission for Gender Equality in the Public Sector (CGEPS). CGEPS was established in 2020 to provide education, support implementation and enforce compliance with the act.
Our actions to date
The first step in this process was reporting our baseline workplace gender audit data, which we captured in 2021. This data formed the baseline for our Gender Equality Action Plan (GEAP), which we published in May last year.
While there have been some delays in processing, CGEPS has now reviewed and published our data on its Insights Portal, alongside our GEAP, making both publicly available.
Associate Director Diversity and Inclusion Abby Sullivan says the feedback from CGEPS on our data reporting and the quality of our GEAP was positive.
‘Our data reporting was found to be completely compliant with the commission’s requirements, and fulfilled all obligations, which is a great baseline starting point,' said Abby.
‘The insights portal is an important tool both for accountability and understanding how and where we can do better.
‘It enables anyone to look up both our baseline data and our GEAP. That could include current and prospective employees, stakeholders and government partners, who want to understand how we are working to improve gender equality in our workplace.’
Baseline report – 2021 workplace gender audit data analysis
Using collated data across the span of organisations reporting for the first time under the Gender Equality Act 2020, CGEPS has produced a baseline report to provide an overview of the current state and nature of gender inequality.
Synthesising these results is vital to support the sector to address persistent blockers of, and accelerate progress towards, gender equality.
Overall key trends identified in the executive summary include:
- The pay gap in defined entities is lower than for the private sector nationally, but there is still a long way to go.
- While women are overrepresented in defined entities, they are also overrepresented in part-time work.
- Women are significantly underrepresented in leadership positions.
- Sexual harassment is gendered and underreporting of incidents is a key concern.
- Data collection and reporting on formal complaints of sexual harassment must be improved.
- Caring responsibilities continue to impact women’s workforce participation, while a lack of uptake of flexible working options by men embeds stereotypical gender roles at work and home.
Abby says this collective data is useful to understand overall trends across the sector and where our organisations data follows these patterns, or shows different trends.
‘Our baseline data showed stronger numbers for percentage of women employed across the organisation and in managerial roles, compared to the overall baseline report. However our gender pay gap, while being lower than the national average, washigher than the overall Victorian public sector. We also saw similar trends in regards to underreporting of sexual harassment, women being overrepresented in part time work and in caring responsibilities.
‘The Baseline report makes a number of recommendations to organisations based on the overall findings. One in particular that we are focusing on is to look at our gender pay gap by employment level to better understand what is occurring at VLA and what actions we can take to make improvements.
'Since data for the baseline report was generated in 2021, we have also focused on increasing the visibility of our trans and gender diverse staff in our data, and hope that they will be better reflected in upcoming progress reports.
‘We are required to make progress reports about our GEAP, gender impact assessments and workplace gender audit to CGEPS every two years and our next report is due in February 2024. This will be an opportunity to see how we have progressed toward achieving our goals, as well as compared to wider workforce trends.’
Our ongoing work to improve gender equality
We are committed to continuously improving our own practices when it comes to gender equality, and we’ve made some great progress in the past year.
Since we launched our GEAP, we have introduced new tools and programs, including respectful workplace behaviour training for all staff, and our anonymous reporting portal, Speak Up.
We are also developing new resources to support staff and build our capability to complete Gender Impact Assessments (GIAs). GIAs work to ensure new policies, programs and services (and those up for review), which directly and significantly impact the public, benefit all Victorians.
Our Equitable Briefing Strategy was also launched in February last year, aiming to improve the number of women and diverse counsel we brief. This year we will progress the strategy by encouraging panel practitioners who do legally aided work to join us in our briefing targets, as well as working to include gender diverse counsel in our targets.
More information
View the 2021 workplace gender audit data snapshot on the CGEPS website.
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