Gender equality: time to get our hands dirty

What can women in the workforce do to hasten the painfully slow path to equality?

For real change, gender equality improvements need to be driven from the ground up.

The gender-equality state of play is nothing for Australia to be proud of. While initiatives to improve the situation have been in place for some time, progress has been painfully slow.

Pay inequality starts the moment a woman joins the workforce, and the gap continues to grow from there. To help address the problem, the Workplace Gender Equality Agency was established in 2012. Its governing act requires employers with 100 or more staff to submit an annual report to the agency against six gender-equality indicators. These include composition of the workforce, equal remuneration, employment terms, sex-based harassment and discrimination.

I applaud the idea of the WGEA. My concern is that it covers only one-third of the workforce — for the remaining two-thirds, the status quo remains.

Even for those it does cover, progress has been glacial. Only the minority of them are actually taking proactive steps on the gender-equality indicators. The WGEA is a top-down initiative. At the present rate of change, it will take a long time before we will see and experience any difference in the composition of our organisations, the diminishment of sex-based harassment and discrimination, and a balancing of women’s pay cheques and superannuation savings.

So where does this leave us?

Change needs to come from the top down. It also needs to come from the bottom up. Without it, my concern is that 20 years from now my young daughter will be working in an environment not too dissimilar from what we have today. That would be a tragedy. Thank goodness we have other options. We can drive change on an individual level. The biggest driver for change should be through the women themselves.

It seems incongruent the WGEA and the act do not have a focus on empowering women at an individual level. We should be empowering women and leveraging their intellect, empathy, ambition and drive for equality.

While reporting is important, it is still too passive. It is just as important for resources to be directed towards grassroots initiatives for women. This includes educating and arming girls in high school and university on the topics of career management, salary negotiation, resilience and confidence building and understanding bias (for girls and boys). We need to educate and encourage them to act, to back themselves more often and take bigger risks.

Women in the workforce should be getting together to review progress in their own workplace, be it in the private or government sector, and seeking resources from employers to provide training in these same areas, and empowering women in their careers to take on leadership and executive roles. Separate progress also needs to be developed for those on Centrelink payments or mums and others returning to work.

We need less talk and more action; less focus on reporting at the top and more getting our hands dirty and providing real training and development opportunities to educate and empower men and women on topics that underpin gender equality in Australia.

Kelly Magowan is a career consultant at the University of Melbourne’s Melbourne Business School.