5. Steps to complete a report

A corporate group, also known as Corporate Structure – is a group of legal entities (subsidiaries) controlled by a parent entity. The Workplace Gender Equality Act 2012 identifies a relevant employer as either a standalone or an entire corporate group.

Registration & Eligibility

• If your entire group employs 100 or more employees in total – you must register all employing entities with WGEA regardless of their individual entity size
• Your group will not be required to report when the total employee count across all employing entities falls below 80 for 6 or more months of a reporting period.

Submitting data

• You must ensure that all subsidiaries that employ staff are included in your submission(s) to WGEA
• You do not need to complete separate reports for each ABN, you can combine one or more legal entities into a single ‘submission group’

Submission Groups

• A submission group is a group of legal entities from the same corporate group that choose to or have been nominated to submit data in the same report submission to the Agency
• Organisations can form a submission group if they are part of the same corporate structure, enrolled in the same program, have similar workplace policies and strategies, and the roles and responsibilities of managers are similar
• A corporate group can have more than one submission group or report their entire group in one submission if each organisations meets the requirements outlined above
• You should report more than 80 employees per submission group to ensure that the data is able to be utilised for benchmarking purposes.

Compliance certificates are issued only when all submission groups within a corporate group have completed the report without recording any issues. 

A partnership organisation is a structure made up of 2 or more people who distribute income or losses between themselves. This includes:

• General partnerships
• Limited partnerships
• Incorporated limited partnerships

Registration

Partnership organisations must identify themselves as such at registration or when confirming details to start a submission.

• The registration form will identify your organisation as a partnership if the entity type associated with your ABN on the Australian Business Register is a type of partnership.
• You can also manually select ‘Yes’ to the question ‘Is this organisation a partnership and/or are there partners in its governing body?’ when you confirm details at the start of a submission

This will ensure that the platform expects a partnership version of the Workforce Management Statistics to be submitted for this organisation. The partnership version contains an additional question on the composition of your equity and non-equity managers.

Submitting data

When you confirm your organisational details you will be prompted to check a box for any organisation that has equity or non-equity partners.

When an organisation has been identified as a partnership:

• You will answer an additional question in the Workforce Management Statistics sheet relating to the number of equity and non-equity partners
• You should include employed partners in the data you submit to the Agency as they are employees.

If your partnership structure is covered under the Act, you must report on:

• the managing partner, as CEO
• full- or part-salaried partners
• full-equity partners and non-equity partners who are on partnership terms and agreements (no salary) for gender composition of governing bodies.

A joint venture is a company set up by two or more other companies. For example, Company X is a joint venture, and Company A and Company B each own equal parts. Under the Act, Company A and Company B will often be relevant employers.

Registration & Eligibility

If Company A and Company B both own 50% of Company X, then Company X:

• also counts as a relevant employer if it has 100 or more employees
• must report for itself as a standalone.

But if Company A has more control than Company B, Company X becomes a subsidiary of Company A.

• If control is equally shared and no company owns a majority stake, then the joint venture is treated as a standalone entity.

Complete a registration form in the WGEA portal if an employer has not done so previously.

• Registrations must be reviewed by WGEA staff before being processed, this can take 1-3 business days.
• If you have registered previously, you do not need to re-register each year.

Obtain a Digital Identity (such as myGovID) to access the WGEA Portal.

• WGEA staff cannot assist you with any issues relating to the setup or authorisation of your credential, please notify the Agency if an error specifically states to contact WGEA or states that there is a 'force.com' error.

Details are recorded with WGEA in the ‘Organisation’ tab of the Portal before beginning the report.

• For items that are unable to be changed, please lodge a support request

To access an active program after logging in on the Portal homepage, click on the hyperlinked name (e.g. click 2022-2023 Gender Equality Reporting) to start your submission.

When starting a report you must confirm the company and contact details:

• If details that were confirmed and are then changed midway through a submission, the new details will need to be reconfirmed in the first step before continuing.
• No work that has already been completed in the Portal will be lost.

The questionnaire is an online survey related to an employer’s policies, strategies, and actions on gender equality.

• You can save and exit at any time completing the questionnaire without losing any work.

This section is an Excel worksheet designed to collect information about employee movements over the course of the reporting period.

• If your organisation has any equity or non-equity partners on your governing body please use the partnerships file version.

An Excel worksheet designed to collect information about workforce composition, salaries, and remuneration. There are two types of WPP worksheet to choose between:

• Unit level - the default template suitable for everyone. Manual calculations are required to convert employee’s salary/rem to an annualised/FTE standard.

• STP - for advanced we strongly recommend that you use the Unit Level file in the first instance.

After the reporting platform completes an automatic data check/validation you will be advised if there are any data quality anomalies detected.

• Files can take up to an hour to be checked by the reporting platform.
• Data anomalies can be reviewed under the 'Issues' column within the submission overview.
• A status of ‘no issues’ or ‘issues found’ will be visible for each uploaded file, the reporting platform will email the report contact an autogenerated email on the outcome.
• If informed of potential data anomalies with an uploaded file(s) the report contact will need to return to where the file was uploaded to review and resolve any identified issues.

Please note - to ensure that the data being submitted can be used and benchmarked against other participants, any identified data anomalies detected on the uploaded files must be resolved.

There are three 'issue types' for data anomalies:

• ERRORS: You must resolve these first. These indicate a data error that must be resolved. You must read the instructions provided to amend your data and re-upload the file.
• WARNINGS: These indicate that the data provided is unusual or unexpected. This means that you must check your data. If correct, you must provide a reason. If incorrect, please amend your data and re-upload the file.
• NOTIFICATIONS: These indicate that the data provided is unusual or unexpected. This means that you must confirm your data is intentional. If correct, you may proceed. If incorrect, please amend your data and re-upload the file.

To ensure the submission data is accurate a report contact will need to generate, download, and review the reporting documents from the submission.

Each section of a submission must be 'complete' before a report contact can successfully generate documents for review. Documents are generated using the labelled buttons on the page the report contact completed each section of the submission.

The following documents generate as pdfs in the Data and Insights tab of the Portal:

• Questionnaire – Public Report: Lists the mandatory questions and answers provided in the questionnaire section.
• Questionnaire – Confidential: Lists the mandatory and voluntary questions and answers provided in this section of the submission.
• Workforce Management Statistics – Public Report: Details the employee movements in a data table that was reported in this section of the submission.
• Workplace Profile – Public Report: Information on the composition of the employee base reported in this section of the submission.
• Workplace Profile – Confidential: Adds to the public version by including salary and remuneration averages for female and male employees used to calculate gender pay gaps.
• Reporting Overview: Summary of the entire submission, contains an organisation-wide gender pay gap figure calculated from the submitted data

Report data can be edited, and reports regenerated at any time before submission.

• If submission was made before an official deadline there is a guaranteed 28 days to make any changes (from the first date of submission) to a completed and lodged report.

The CEO or equivalent must review and approve the submission of the data contained in the following documents.

Required to be reviewed and approved:

• Questionnaire – Public Report: required
• Workforce Management Statistics – Public Report: required
• Workplace Profile – Public Report: required
• Workplace Profile – Confidential: required

Not required but recommended to be reviewed and approved:

• Questionnaire – Confidential: not required but recommended.
• Reporting Overview: not required but recommended.

Approval can be internally recorded using a Submission Approval form, a signed form does not need to be uploaded into the Portal.

• When approval to submit has been provided (verbally or written) the report contact returns to the Portal and checks the declaration and consent box that indicates approval was sought and provided by the CEO or equivalent.

Once any data quality anomalies have been resolved and the CEO or equivalent has approved the submission, the report contact will need to complete the declarations and consents section of the Portal. To enable the final lodgement of the Gender Equality Report they will need to confirm:

• That the CEO (or equivalent) has approved the submission.
• That the report does not contain any personal information (as defined by the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth)) – for example, identifying information provided in the free text area of the questionnaire.
• Alternatively, if the report contains personal information, the report contact must specify this in the space provided.

When the two mandatory declarations/consents have been completed, the report contact can then click on the 'submit' button to officially lodge the Gender Equality Report. 

Once the submission has been completed the report contact can download the Reporting Overview, which provides some initial insights from the submitted data – gender composition, employee movements, and gender pay gaps.

Employers can also benchmark their gender equality performance over time and against any private sector competitors manually using our online Data Explorer.