The theme for International Women’s Day (IWD) 2023 is #EmbraceEquity. It’s an important message for Australian workplaces where the representation of women is lagging in many key industries and where progress in closing the gender pay gap has been slow at best.
We’ve identified diversity, equity and inclusion as a key consideration for all businesses, both for boosting the bottom line and for attracting, engaging and retaining employees. Gender equity is a big part of that.
It’s important to note that equity is not the same as equality. IWD points out that too much focus on equality is no longer enough, and can actually lead to cultures and practices that are more exclusive, rather than inclusive. Instead, all workplaces should be aspiring for equity as a guiding concept. But what exactly is the difference between equity and equality? And what are some practical things that business owners, managers and employees can do to help achieve true gender equity at work?
What is the difference between equity and equality?
Equality is providing everyone with the same conditions and resources. Equity is about ensuring everyone has the conditions and resources they need to access opportunities equally. It recognises everyone is different, and that our social and work structures have evolved in a way that benefits people with certain characteristics over others with different characteristics. It puts mechanisms and cultures in place to support those in the latter group to have an equal chance of success.
IWD has provided a number of cartoons to illustrate the difference simply and clearly. In one, three people of differing heights stand on identical boxes as they try to peer over a high fence. The tallest of the three can see easily, but the shortest finds themselves with their view still impeded by the fence. This is equality, where everyone has access to the same sized box, regardless of individual characteristics, which alone is not enough to produce a fair and equal outcome for all.
Equity on the other hand recognises the differences between the individuals, and adjusts the conditions and resources available to them accordingly, so everyone can see over the fence. Equity is therefore both equal and fair.
How can businesses achieve equity?
So when we talk about gender equity in work settings, we are not simply talking about treating everyone equally. True gender equity requires consideration as to the ways women have been, and are, disadvantaged by existing social and work structures and cultures, and either taking active steps to remove barriers or providing the support needed to overcome them. This means taking an honest look at workplace systems, cultures and behaviours, to identify and eliminate biases.
There are a number of practical steps that business owners, managers and all employees can take to achieve this. Below, we break down five areas that need to be considered in order to break the bias – both conscious and unconscious, and achieve greater gender equity in any workplace. These are: bias in hiring practices, pay transparency, affinity bias, and intersectionality.
Bias in hiring processes
Research has shown that unconscious sexism, racism, and ageism play a big role in who gets hired. This hiring bias is fundamentally unfair, and a huge obstacle to achieving gender equity.
Harvard Business Review provided some sound practical advice for overcoming bias in hiring practices. They recommend things like rethinking the kind of language used in job descriptions, adopting a blind review process for resumes, and making work tests a core aspect of the application process, forcing employees to critique candidates based on their skills rather than unconsciously judging them based on other attributes.
Having standardised interview questions is also important, enabling hiring managers to make a like-for-like comparison between candidate responses, and to avoid other pitfalls such as pregnancy discrimination that women have frequently encountered.
Intersectionality
The Victorian Government’s page on intersectionality defines it as “the ways in which different aspects of a person’s identity can expose them to overlapping forms of discrimination and marginalisation”. When thinking about gender equity in the workplace it’s important to understand this concept, as a woman who is also a person of colour, has experience of disability, and/or other protected attributes will often encounter multiple and compounding forms of discrimination.
In particular, things like biased hiring practises, affinity bias and microaggressions can impact women with multiple protected characteristics and their ability to find meaningful employment and progress in their career. For example, research by the Diversity Council Australia into culturally and racially marginalised (CARM) women in leadership found that:
- 65 per cent of CARM women agreed CARM women employees received fewer opportunities for career advancements than other women.
- 5 per cent felt they had to work twice as hard as employees who weren’t CARM women to get the same treatment or evaluation.
- 65 per cent felt they were ignored or not taken seriously by their managers because of being a CARM woman.
For workplaces to be truly equitable they need to contend with the challenges of intersectionality and develop cultures and practices that remove the barriers that hold these women back.
Affinity bias
Affinity bias describes a tendency to gravitate towards people who remind us of ourselves. When you consider that in Australian businesses women hold just 17.6 per cent of chair positions and 31.2 per cent of directorships, and represent 19.4 per cent of CEOs and 34.5 per cent of key management personnel, it’s easy to see how this can be a barrier to equity. If the majority of people in leadership are men, affinity bias can limit the opportunities offered to women for advancement in their career.
Affinity bias can take many forms. It can mean women are more likely to be talked over or ignored during meetings than their male colleagues. They might be excluded from after-work networking or team-building events (such as dinner or drinks events) where important relationships are nurtured, because they have caregiving responsibilities or due to perceptions that they wouldn’t fit in.
Women who are assertive or express strong opinions are more likely to be labelled as abrasive or troublemakers than their male colleagues (also known as likeability bias). And they are more likely to encounter microaggressions – statements, actions, or incidents regarded as indirect, subtle, or unintentional discrimination. These perpetuate stereotypes and further contribute to exclusion.
Overcoming affinity bias requires CEOs, managers and all employees to be self-aware, and willing to interrogate their thought processes and opinions. Having a mindset where diversity, equity and inclusion are practically and actively sought within the business is another way to break down the tunnel vision that leads to one category of person being favoured over another.
Pay transparency
The latest data reveals women in Australia earn 87 cents for every $1 earned by men. While the gap has closed over time, there has been little movement in the past three years. Those figures don’t even include the wages of part-time or casual workers, or the differences in female dominated industries, many of which are lower paid. Clearly there is still a lot of work to do.
Pay transparency has been identified as a key lever for helping to close the gender wage gap. Speaking ahead of IWD, Emily Martin, Vice President of Education and Workplace Justice at the US National Women's Law Center, said secrecy around ranges and rates of pay can lead to bias creep and allow gender wage gaps and other unfair pay practices to flourish.
“More and more,” she said, “we're seeing efforts to ensure that employers affirmatively provide information to job applicants or to employees about pay ranges for particular positions."
In Australia, the Fair Work Legislation Amendment (Secure Jobs, Better Pay) Act 2022 includes a ban on pay secrecy clauses in employment contracts. This significant workplace reform package passed in December 2022.
Another step forward is the opportunity for commonwealth public sector entities to voluntarily report their gender equality data to the Workplace Gender Equality Agency for the first time in 2022. Public sector entities that participate will gain a better understanding of their progress against key metrics and the ability to benchmark their performance against other organisations in their industry. To participate in the 2022 Public Sector reporting program, you will need to register the details of your organisation in the WGEA portal.
The government introduced legislation, Workplace Gender Equality Amendment (Closing the Gender Pay Gap) Bill 2023, to help close the gender pay gap at work on 8 February 2023. When this has passed parliament, it is expected that reporting will commence in 2024. These measures aim to ensure greater transparency and give women employees the knowledge they need to keep employers accountable on pay discrepancies.
Flexibility
Flexible work arrangements are increasingly the expectation of many employees. In our people strategy resource The Good Workplace Guide we identified flexibility, including things like hybrid work, flexible schedules, and part-time or condensed hours, as one of the keys to attracting and retaining employees.
These things are especially important however for enabling women to participate fully and meaningfully in the workforce. This is because women are far more likely than men to be primary carers to children, or to have other carer responsibilities. In fact, ABS data shows more than 70 per cent of carers in Australia are women, and more than 12 per cent of all women are carers.
Flexibility, alongside practical supports such as robust paid parental and carer’s leave arrangements, are therefore pivotal to providing women with equitable access to job security, economic stability and the ability to progress in their careers.
