Christine Castley address at the Australian Industry Group's annual Policy-Influence-Reform Conference

Hello everyone. 

I acknowledge the Ngunnawal people and the Ngambri (Kamberri) people. I also acknowledge First Nations people joining us today and pay my respects to Elders throughout all time.

Thank you for the opportunity to be here.

Just a week ago, I was here in Canberra at Government House, facilitating a panel discussion that included Innes Willox, to mark 40 years since the passage of the Affirmative Action (Equal Opportunity for Women) Act 1986 - the legislation that created the agency that would ultimately become the Workplace Gender Equality Agency (or WGEA, as we are often called).

We reflected on four decades of enormous change.

In 1986, fewer than half of Australian women participated in the labour force. Today, two-thirds of Australian women are in paid work.

Women have entered occupations, industries and leadership positions that would have been difficult to imagine when the legislation was passed.
But an anniversary is also an opportunity to ask what comes next. 40 years ago, the question was mostly: how do we get more women into the workforce?
 

Today, I think the question is more economically important: Are our workplaces actually designed to make the best use of the labour market available to us?
Because Australia cannot afford workplaces that unnecessarily limit who can do particular jobs; make it harder for people to combine work and care; or lose experienced people just when they should be progressing into leadership.
 

This is the idea I want to share with you today: workplace gender equality is not simply another burden being placed on Australian employers. Rather, it is part of the answer to some of the hardest workforce problems employers already have:

• Skills shortages; finding and keeping good people; building leadership pipelines; increasing participation; and lifting productivity.
   

Before I go further, I want to clear up something that is often misunderstood. (If you already know this, please bear with me). The gender pay gap is not the same thing as equal pay for equal work. If a woman and a man are doing the same job, or work of equal or comparable value, they must be paid equally. This has been the law since 1969. The gender pay gap tells us something different: it looks across a whole workplace or industry and asks ‘is there a difference between what women and men are earning, on average?’ 

It tells us how women and men are distributed at different levels of the organisation and into particular jobs. Who has access to overtime, allowances and bonuses. Who is more likely to work part-time. And who is more heavily represented in the highest paid operational and leadership roles. So, when an employer sees a gender pay gap where women are on average earning less – as they do in every industry in Australia – the interesting question is: ‘what is happening in this workforce that is producing this result?’

Australia is unusually well-placed to explore the story behind this question.

Australian employers with 100 or more employees report information about their workforce and action on gender equality to WGEA every year. We take that data and produce detailed insights about the gender pay gap and what is working well and what still needs more work.

Our last Gender Equality Scorecard covered nearly 6 million employees across 19 industries. Along with the information on the WGEA Data Explorer, this document gives us an extraordinary picture of Australian workplaces, allowing us to see national trends and for employers to compare their organisation with their industry and peers. 

We can see patterns not just across Australia or across an industry, but also within individual organisations.
This matters enormously. Because it allows us to move beyond assumptions and anecdotes, and ask: what is really happening in Australia’s workplaces?

Your WGEA data can show you where talent enters your organisation, where it progresses and where it quietly disappears. It can reveal whether established ways of working are narrowing your workforce options.

In a tight labour market, that is not simply compliance information. It is business intelligence. For many Australians, gender segregation remains the typical experience of work. Only one in three employees works in a gender-balanced workplace.

Half of all women in our dataset work in Health Care and Social Assistance, Education and Training or Retail. At the other end of the labour market, there are around four men for every woman in construction and mining.  Men also significantly outnumber women across industries like agriculture, manufacturing, transport and other essential services. Our most gender-segregated industries are precisely the industries we are relying on to build our future: construction, energy, manufacturing, transport, technology, health and care. And many are experiencing workforce shortages. So, if your industry is overwhelmingly drawing its workforce from one half of the population, it is worth asking:

• Are there capable people who might work in our industry, but currently don’t see a place for themselves in it?

I want to be clear about what I am not suggesting. I am not suggesting we solve a shortage of workers by moving men out of construction and into aged care. That would simply move the problem. We need to expand the talent pool; not redistribute scarcity.
And I am not suggesting employers can or should engineer people’s career choices. People choose different careers for all sorts of reasons: education, family, culture, geography, pay, opportunity and simply what they want to do.
Much of that is beyond the control of an employer.
But employers do control the conditions people encounter when they arrive:
 

• How jobs are designed; how shifts are structured; whether equipment and facilities work for everyone; whether flexibility is genuinely available; who gets development or stretch opportunities; whether taking parental leave carries a career penalty; and whether someone can look around a workplace and see themselves succeeding there.
   

Gender equality works in both directions.
We want women to see construction, manufacturing and technology as careers open to them. And we also want men to see nursing, teaching and care as careers open to them.
 

We want a father to be able to take parental leave without people quietly wondering whether he is serious about his career. And for a man to be able to work flexibly to care for an ageing parent without flexibility being seen as something primarily for women.
 

Australia has made enormous progress in women’s workforce participation. But participation is only the beginning.
Our data shows that the proportion of women in management declines as employees get older.
Women are being promoted into management at similar rates to men. But they are also over-represented among employees who voluntarily resign post entry into management roles.
 

Getting women through the door is not the same as enabling them to stay, progress and lead.
A leadership pipeline cannot be strong if capable people consistently fall out of it.

Many of our assumptions about the ideal worker were formed not just when we had fewer women in the workforce, but also when we had different ideas about the nature of work and families - who does the caring; who works full-time; who takes parental leave; who gets the career-defining assignment; what leadership looks like; and what you need to sacrifice to have a successful career.
We have changed who is in the workplace faster than how we work and what workplaces look like.
Our assumptions have consequences for women. But increasingly they also constrain men. And changing them doesn’t always require an enormous intervention.

In construction, one male-dominated employer expanded its parental leave arrangements introduced more flexible ways of working, including condensed working fortnights, and actively encouraging fathers to take leave. The number of men taking parental leave more than tripled.
 

Why does this matter?
Not simply because more men took leave. It changed the signals the workplace was sending about what a committed employee and a committed father could look like.
When men have greater opportunity to share care, women have greater opportunity to participate and progress. This is gender equality working in both directions.
Another employer in the resources sector, has introduced on-site childcare to help employees balance work and caring. This has reduced stress for working parents, simplified daily routines and helped employees return to work with confidence after parental leave. For the business, it has helped keep talented people in the workforce.
There is an obvious question here. If these changes are good for business, why doesn’t WGEA simply leave businesses to get on with them?
 

My answer starts with this: you know your business better than we do. We don’t know which engineer you should hire. We don’t know how you should roster a particular site. We don’t know what your next operating model should look like. Nor should we.
What we do have is a different vantage point: we have visibility across close to six million employees.
This lets us identify patterns an individual employer cannot see from its workforce alone; and allows you to benchmark your organisation against your industry and peers.
The point of WGEA’s data is not for us to tell you how to run your business. It is to support you to ask better questions about your business.
And if the last four decades have been about building visibility and accountability, then the next phase of progress is about turning insight into action.
 

This year, large employers selected Gender Equality Targets for the first time in their normal WGEA reporting with 3 years to meet them or demonstrate progress.
Why require targets?
 

Because while many employers have been working on gender equality for years, substantial gaps persist across the economy.
Targets provide direction, but the right priorities will differ between employers.
 

A mining company trying to attract women into operational roles has a very different workforce challenge from a health care employer trying to attract more men.
 

An employer operating in a remote community faces different constraints from one in a major city. 
The availability of skilled workers, the location of jobs, workforce demographics and local infrastructure all affect the pace of progress.
 

Targets need to be ambitious. But they also need to be grounded in an organisation’s workforce data and business context.
This is why employers can choose from a range of numerical and action targets, using information they already report to WGEA. 
We are still analysing the targets employers selected in the first round but the most commonly chosen target across all industries is increasing the representation of women or men in non-manager occupations where they are currently under-represented.
 

The priorities vary by industry. That is precisely what we would expect.
Gender-balanced industries, particularly higher-paying industries such as finance and professional services, are more likely to focus on improving gender balance in management.
 

Across industries, employers are also recognising the value of hearing directly from their employees through surveys, exit interviews and employee representative groups.
Soon, CEOs and Boards will receive this year’s WGEA Industry Benchmark Report.
And, in November, WGEA will release the 2025-6 employer data and Gender Equality Scorecard with new results from the information that employers reported to us this year.
 

So: what should employers do?
 

I want to leave you today with 3 things.
 

First, know where you are losing or underusing talent.
Use your WGEA data and the Data Explorer and benchmark yourself against your industry and peers. Don’t stop at the headline gender pay gap. Look underneath it: Who gets recruited? Who progresses? Who leaves? Who works part-time? Who gets the opportunities that lead to the next job? Use the data not just to measure your organisation; use it to interrogate your organisation.
 

Second, interrogate the design of work in your organisation.
Don’t simply ask whether you have flexible work or parental leave policies. Ask who actually uses them and what happens to their careers when they do. Ask whether jobs/shifts/rosters and hours of work, really need to be designed the way they currently are. And whether something about your workplace is unnecessarily narrowing the pool of people you can attract or retain. And ask your employees: numbers tell us what is happening. Employees tell us why.
 

Third, make gender equality part of workforce strategy. If you have a skills shortage, ask whether gender is unnecessarily limiting the pool from which you recruit. If you have a retention problem, ask whether women and men are leaving for different reasons. If you have a leadership pipeline problem, look at where people fall out of it. Remember that retention also shapes who remains in the organisation long enough to lead it.
Don’t put gender equality in a separate box marked HR or DEI. Put it alongside workforce planning, skills, retention, productivity and business strategy. Because that is where it belongs.
 

And as you think about those challenges, I encourage you to think critically and creatively about the way work is designed and ask:
What genuinely has to be this way, and what have we simply assumed has to be this way?
There will always be real constraints. Safety is non-negotiable. So are many operational requirements. Gender equality doesn’t require employers to compromise either.
But sometimes what looks like an operational necessity is simply a longstanding practice that can be re-designed. And when you find one of those, the question isn’t just: what will it cost to change? It is also: what is it costing us not to?

• The cost of a vacancy that takes months to fill.
• The cost of losing an experienced employee and recruiting and training their replacement.
• The cost of skills sitting unused because someone can’t work the particular hours or pattern that the job has historically required.
• The opportunity cost of recruiting from a narrower talent pool than you need to.
   

Sometimes, change costs money. The business question is whether doing nothing costs more. 40 years ago, Australia challenged assumptions about women’s place in the workforce that had once seemed fixed. We have made extraordinary progress since then.

The challenge for the next 40 years is to keep asking what else we have mistaken for fixed. Not because every workplace should look the same. And not because WGEA knows your business better than you do. But because Australia needs to make the best possible use of the talent we have. For employers facing skills shortages, demographic change, technological disruption and relentless pressure lift productivity, workplace gender equality is not peripheral to the business challenge. It is part of how we build the workforce we need.
 

Thank you.