Why I’m calling on HR leaders to act now

International Women’s Month is coming, with the official theme in Australia, “Balance the Scales”. If your organisation treats it as a one-week awareness campaign, you will miss both the point and the opportunity, writes Simone Clarke.

Women now earn, on average, 78.9¢ for every dollar earned by men – a 21.1 per cent total remuneration gender pay gap that equates to a difference of $28,356 a year. Over a career, that is life‑changing money.

What troubles me most is not that we lack answers. The data is clear, and the solutions are well understood. What is missing is urgency – and the time to act is now.

April 2026 is now firmly on the planning horizon for every large employer. Organisations with 500 or more employees must have gender equality targets set by then under amendments to the Workplace Gender Equality Act, with at least one target being numerical. These targets will sit alongside the employer gender pay gaps that WGEA is already publishing, meaning that gaps and progress are visible to current staff, potential employees, and investors. This is now law, not suggestion.

Through our engagement with organisations and companies wanting to drive gender equality, the question I’m hearing consistently is the same: “What can we do?” My answer is always the same, too: this is your moment to lead – not just comply.

What the research actually shows

Long‑term research from WGEA in partnership with the Bankwest Curtin Economics Centre (BCEC) has confirmed what many HR leaders have suspected for years: gender equality is a performance strategy, not just a social one. Organisations with more women in leadership positions are more profitable and more productive, and for a $1 billion ASX‑listed company, moving towards gender‑balanced leadership can equate to $93 million in added value.

The 2024–25 Scorecard also highlights how inequality is maintained in practice. Differences in who is hired, promoted, and retained continue to drive gaps, with higher resignation rates among women at key career points undermining progress. At the same time, recent Equal Pay Day reporting and employer surveys show that visible gender pay gaps are increasingly influencing workers’ decisions about where they choose to work and stay, particularly among women and younger employees. When those people walk out the door, organisations lose experience, relationships, and future leaders they cannot easily replace.

What real change looks like

Through UN Women Australia’s Leadership Network – which brings together leaders from the private, government, academic and community sectors – I see talented people hitting the same wall. They know what to do. They can articulate the business case. But they struggle to move from policy to culture. Gender equality is still too often treated as a compliance box or a standalone HR initiative, rather than a whole-of-business transformation.

Let me be direct: that mindset will not work in 2026. Your employees – and your competitors – will not be fooled by performative action. They are watching whether your commitment is real.

The organisations moving fastest are not necessarily those with the most sophisticated HR systems. They are the ones where leadership actively champions culture change. That means:

• Data as a starting point. Conduct a genuine gender pay gap analysis. Go beyond the headline figure to examine patterns: where women and men are concentrated, what is happening with progression, and what the flows in and out look like. This is not about blame; it is about understanding.
• Systemic policy change. Ensure transparent hiring and promotion processes. Provide equitable parental leave – and support men to take it, with men’s uptake of primary carer leave now rising in the WGEA data – and enable flexible work at all levels, not only at entry level. These may sound basic, but they are not optional in 2026.
• Culture, not just policy. You can have exemplary policies on paper and still have a culture where women feel excluded, where ambition is judged differently depending on gender, and where “leadership potential” is coded in narrow ways. Changing this requires deliberate, visible, sustained leadership and engaging men as active participants, not passive observers.

International Women’s Month and beyond

International Women’s Month is coming, with the official theme in Australia, “Balance the Scales”. If your organisation treats it as a one-week awareness campaign, you will miss both the point and the opportunity.

What if International Women’s Month became the moment that you publicly committed to your targets – to your employees, your sector and your investors? What if you invited all staff – women, men, and people of all genders – into a serious conversation about what workplace equality actually requires?

Workplace gender equality is fundamentally about trust: whether employees believe they’ll be paid equitably, given fair advancement opportunities, heard on harassment reports, and judged on merit rather than connections. For HR leaders, that trust is a competitive edge – in talent-scarce markets, organisations building genuine equality attract better people, retain them longer, and make superior decisions, as research confirms. Action is needed now.

Simone Clarke is the chief executive of UN Women Australia.