40 years on, it’s time to rethink work in Australia

This September is 40 years since the passage of the Affirmative Action (Equal Employment Opportunity for Women) Act, legislation that transformed Australia’s approach to workplace gender equality and established what is now the Workplace Gender Equality Agency (WGEA), writes WGEA CEO Christine Castley.

Forty years ago, Australia made a significant decision. Rather than simply outlawing discrimination, we began asking employers to examine what was actually happening inside their workplaces and to address the barriers preventing women from participating and progressing at work.

It was ambitious at the time.

Today, the principle that employers should understand their workforce and take responsibility for workplace gender equality is widely accepted.

Today, WGEA collects and publishes workplace gender equality data from more than 10,000 employers covering more than 5.8 million Australian employees.

Anniversaries should do more than celebrate progress. They should lead us to ask whether the ideas that got us here are enough to take us to where we need to go next.

Australia’s workforce has changed profoundly over those 40 years.

In 1986, fewer than half of Australian women participated in paid work. Today, it is close to two-thirds.

Women are a fundamental part of Australia’s professional, skilled, and educated workforce. This is a remarkable transformation. But women and men remain concentrated in different industries and occupations. Women are still less likely to reach senior leadership and much more likely to work part-time and carry the greater share of unpaid care.

The people in our workplaces have changed. Some of the assumptions around which work is organised have been much slower to change. This matters for gender equality. But increasingly, it also matters for Australia’s economy.

We are debating skills shortages, productivity, and how Australia can make the most of its human capital. Australia has invested enormously in the skills and education of its people. It makes little sense to continue to organise work in ways that unnecessarily prevent or discourage some of that capability from being used.

This does not mean that every job can be redesigned around individual preferences. Workplaces have customers to serve, projects to deliver, production schedules to meet, and services that must operate around the clock. Good workplace design is not about saying yes to every employee’s request. But it is about being rigorous about what work requires, creative about how those requirements can be met, and honest about the costs and trade-offs involved.

A construction worker cannot work from home. Neither can a nurse, miner, or retail employee. But this does not mean there are no choices about how work is organised. Roster design, predictable shifts, job-sharing, compressed hours, career structures, and access to flexibility can all affect who can enter an industry, who stays, and who progresses.

And this is not only about women. Traditional assumptions about work and care have similarly constrained choices for men. Men also stand to gain through greater freedom to participate in family life as caring becomes a more normal and equally shared part of working life. Creating workplaces in which men have genuine opportunities to share care, and women have genuine opportunities to participate across the economy, is part of the same challenge.

Former minister Susan Ryan understood that foundational measures such as the 1972 Equal Pay decision and the 1984 Sex Discrimination Act were important, but not enough. The Affirmative Action Act asked large employers to actively audit their workforces, identify the systemic barriers women faced, and do something about them. This was a significant shift in thinking: from asking whether the rules were equal to asking whether the outcomes told us something about how workplaces actually operate.

Four decades later, Australia has one of the world’s most comprehensive sources of workplace gender equality data. We have come a long way, and that progress is worth celebrating.

The next chapter of workplace gender equality will require ambition as much as evidence and concerted effort.

History shows that progress happens when we are prepared to question the status quo. Forty years ago, asking employers to actively measure what was happening in their workplaces and address barriers facing women was ambitious. Today, it is widely accepted.

People will always need to adapt to the genuine requirements of their jobs. But workplaces should also be prepared to ask which requirements are genuinely necessary, and which are simply the way we have always done things.

If we get this right, the dividend will extend well beyond gender equality. We can unlock skills, increase workforce participation, and strengthen workforce participation, not by asking people to fit an inherited model of work, but by designing work around what the job genuinely requires, and the workforce Australia actually has.

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