WGEA Review Report

Review of the Workplace Gender Equality Act 2012, December 2021

Scope of the Workplace Gender Equality Act

Current approach

Currently the Workplace Gender Equality Act covers around 40 per cent of employees in Australia. The Workplace Gender Equality Act requires ‘relevant employers’ to report to WGEA. ‘Relevant employer’ is defined in section 3 of the Act as meaning:

  • a natural person, or a body or association (whether incorporated or not), being the employer of 100 or more employees in Australia, or
  • a registered higher education provider that is an employer.

The Workplace Gender Equality Act does not currently cover Commonwealth, State, or Territory public sectors.

However, in the Australian Government’s response to recommendation 43(a) of the Respect@Work report the Australian Government announced in Roadmap for Respect it would amend the Workplace Gender Equality Act to ‘require public sector organisations to report to WGEA on gender equality initiatives.’ The Australian Government will start mandatory reporting to WGEA from 2022-23 and a voluntary trial is underway.

The Women’s Budget Statement 2021-22 noted that ahead of legislative amendment of the Workplace Gender Equality Act, WGEA will adapt its reporting and data management system for the public sector and work with the Australian Public Service Commission and relevant APS agencies to create a more comprehensive, representative and accurate data set of the Australian workforce. These changes will assist public and private sector organisations to benchmark performance against each other in order to better understand their progress against key metrics of gender equality, including to address workplace sexual harassment.

Proposed approach

State and Territory governments

Many stakeholders supported expansion of WGEA’s scope to include public sector reporting to WGEA. Stakeholders said governments should report to WGEA in the same way that the private sector, not-for-profits and universities are required to do.

As governments have made significant announcements about reporting to WGEA, no recommendation is made on this issue. As noted above, earlier this year the Australian Government announced it will start reporting to WGEA from 2022-23. Further to that, on 10 December 2021, National Cabinet announced in principle agreement that all jurisdictions, including states and territories, will provide public sector workforce data to WGEA as soon as possible:

As part of National Cabinet’s work on a Nationally Consistent Reporting Framework for Measuring Progress of Women’s Economic Security, there was in principle agreement from the National Cabinet to provide public sector workforce data to the Workplace Gender Equality Agency (WGEA). This means that state and territory governments will join the Commonwealth Government’s commitment from earlier this year to provide data on six Gender Equality Indicators. This will expand the Australian workforce covered by consistent reporting on workforce gender equality approaches and outcomes, which can be used to continue to target efforts to reduce the gender pay gap.

National Cabinet’s in principle agreement is in line with extensive stakeholder support for governments to report to WGEA. Expanding WGEA’s scope to include state and territory public sectors would further increase WGEA’s data to cover nearly 60 per cent of Australian employees.

Other scope issues

Stakeholders raised a variety of other scope-related issues that are covered later in this report. Small business coverage is addressed in the next section on making reporting easier for business. Inclusion of non-binary people is addressed in Recommendation 7.2. Coverage of partners in partnership structures is addressed in Recommendation 7.3.b.