Do you need help with your WGEA reporting?
The Workplace Gender Equality Act (2012) requires all non-public organisations that employ 100 or more people in Australia to report annually on a range of measures on gender equality. These measures include the numbers of women employed at different levels of the organisation and on the governing body or board; the provision of flexible working arrangements and other supports for parents and carers; the availability and use of parental leave; average salaries across different levels; employee consultation mechanisms and the prevention of sexual harassment and discrimination. Employers reports are due to be submitted via the WGEA online portal between the 1st April and the 31st May each year, and the reference period for reporting is the 1st April to the 31st March prior.
Getting ready for WGEA reporting
So that the WGEA can make the best use of data collected from around 5000 employers in different industries with a wide variety of organisational structures, the reporting instrument was developed to be as broadly applicable as possible. That means that each organisation needs to configure their data to fit the reporting template, and this is often neither quick nor straightforward.
The WGEA reporting instrument requires information about the strategies and policies that an organisation has in place to support gender equality in addition to the ‘numbers’ about people and pay. To prepare for WGEA reporting, it is important to first of all read through the indicative reporting form and decide where each piece of information can be sourced.
For the number-crunching component of the report, each organisation will need to approach it in a way that best suits them, but some useful rules of thumb are:
Configure your data to fit with the Manager and Non-Manager categories specified by the WGEA. Details of the expected contents of each category are available on the WGEA website. This can be a complex undertaking, depending on how closely your organisation structure matches the hierarchies in the WGEA reporting framework.
Create a dataset that categorises employees according to the reporting framework, and populate the dataset accordingly
Do analyses to calculate the numbers and percentages needed to complete the reporting instrument.
For the qualitative components of the form:
Gather together the information about strategies and policies and indicate their status on the reporting form.
Gather qualitative information about activities and initiatives that your organisation has undertaken to promote gender equality. This may be, for example, a women’s mentoring programme, a fathers and flexibility initiative, or setting up a mothers-and-babies room.
How we can help
The Agenda Agency has extensive experience of the WGEA reporting form and function and can assist reporting organisations to understand the WGEA requirements, as well as help them to apply the WGEA categories to their own workforce. The Agenda Agency has experience in applying the WGEA framework to large and complex organisations and assisting those organisations with the completion of their reporting requirements.
For organisations that want to go on to apply for an Employer of Choice for Gender Equality (EOCGE) citation, The Agenda Agency can work with you to understand where work needs to be done to improve your chances of being awarded the WGEA tick. We can then help you to develop strategic initiatives that will support your organisation to be successful in applying for an EOCGE Citation.