Gender reporting can benefit women and business at the same time.

There has been a lot of coverage of the gender reporting debate recently. 

What is not being covered is the work that the Australian Human Right Commission and the Business Council of Australia are doing together to identify ways to improve and streamline the gender reporting required.

For those who are unfamiliar with it, gender reporting is one national initiative aimed at helping to achieve better gender balance in all types and at all levels of Australian workplaces.

Increasing gender diversity and the participation of women in the workforce generates significant benefits, not only for companies, but for Australia’s economy.

What we know is that women's success in education is not translating into achievement in paid work. We used to think it would be enough if we simply educated women and provided the opportunity.  But the evidence has shown us that building and growing organisations in which both men and women can thrive takes more than this.

And evidence is the key – just as it is in any other pursuit of improvement, be it business, scientific or personal. In the case of measuring progress in gender equality in Australian workplaces, we need strong, robust data to be collected, reported and used to pin point where change is required.

Here-in lies the problem. Asking businesses to collect this data so that we women can ensure there is a gender equal future for us and our children, means the collection (and subsequent reporting) of certain data needs to be prescribed. And, inevitably, this leads to debates about the regulatory burden on business.

What is damaging about these arguments is that they end up as some sort of false choice between achieving gender equality and reducing regulation. As if we can’t do both at the same time.

It is the same old excuse that women should take a backseat because progressing gender equality is just too much trouble.

In an increasingly regulated world, there is certainly room to reduce the impost on businesses so that the exercise of data collection and reporting is not too onerous.  and we should do that because if business does not thrive neither do we.  But these regulatory savings should not be delivered at the expense of the quality of the data.

Surely, streamlining data collection and reporting is a far more constructive response? Data collection and reporting should not be unnecessarily complex and should not duplicate information collected elsewhere by government agencies. 

We can’t afford to lose sight of the fact that collecting the right data and tracking progress is what drives change. Through analysing the data, organisations are able to identify where the gaps are, and then adjust and target their measures.  This is something all organisations do every day in relation to revenue and costs, in relation to the services they provide, the sales they make or the improvement of the products they produce.

The Business Council of Australia recently produced a research report entitled ‘Increasing the number of women in senior executive positions’, which identified the importance of improving gender diversity outcomes, both in terms of fairness and equity and also in terms of improved business pgerformance.

This report highlighted the reality that progress on gender diversity is best enabled by companies having company-specific, well designed, measured and monitored gender diversity strategies, driven by the board, chief executive and senior management team.

There is obvious benefit, both to individual companies and the nation, in having the government collect national data on broad trends in gender diversity. After all, without national data, policy-makers cannot design evidenced based responses and find policy solutions. And that is when we all lose – women, men, business, the economy.

Soon, the Workplace Gender Equality Agency will provide confidential customised benchmark reports to each organisation that undertakes this gender reporting. These reports should enable businesses to see how they compare to others in their same sector and of a similar size. This information should also help organisations identify where they are doing well and where they need to improve. Coupled with targeted advice from the Agency, organisations will have the tools necessary to improve over time.

Lets be clear it will be the strategies that individual businesses introduce to address the particular blockages to the recruitment and progress of women in their organisation that will count for  women, the business and for the economy. All businesses need to be better accessing the skills, creativity and labour of over fifty percent of Australia’s talent pool - the part of the talent pool that is often ignored or disadvantaged because of gender.

We can collect invaluable data from our business community that will help propel action toward solving gender inequality in Australian workplaces. And we can ‘cut red tape’ at the same time by streamlining data collection and reporting processes.

We simply need to ensure that, alongside the data, companies are able to put practical and innovative strategies in place that will achieve workplace gender equality.

We can do this. We can deliver superior results for companies while ensuring that we harness the talent and skills of both men and women.

By Jennifer Westacott, Chief Executive of the Business Council of Australia and Elizabeth Broderick, Sex Discrimination Commissioner from the Australian Human Rights Commission. Both organisations have provided feedback and recommendations to the government on the proposed changes to the gender equality reporting requirements under the Workplace Gender Equality Act 2012 (the Act) and proposed new minimum standards.