Gender Targets Should Not Stop at the State Border
Australia has entered a new chapter in workplace gender equity. From April 2026, employers with over 500 employees are required by Federal Government’s Workplace Gender Equality Agency (WGEA) framework to select three gender targets and, over time, meet them or demonstrate measurable improvement.
This is a meaningful shift: from reporting what is happening to being accountable for changing it, however, there is an unfinished piece of the architecture.
Commonwealth public-sector employers are now included in WGEA reporting and targets. State and Territory public-sector employers are not. That matters because government is not a side player in Australia’s labour market but one of our largest employment systems, shaping who gets recruited, promoted, developed, paid and seen as leadership material.
Importantly, reflecting the community that government serves.
If gender equality targets are important enough for large private employers and Commonwealth agencies, State and Territory governments should be held to comparable standards of transparency, target-setting and public accountability.
Reporting matters because recruitment compounds
Workforce composition is the accumulated outcome of thousands of decisions about recruitment, promotion, development, flexible work, performance, talent identification and succession.
When women are overrepresented in lower-paid or lower-status roles, while men remain overrepresented in senior, technical or leadership positions, the explanation is rarely a single reason, a single policy misstep or a single biased decision. It is often the compound effect of systems that repeatedly reward familiarity, uninterrupted availability, traditional leadership signals and narrow definitions of merit.
That is why WGEA’s move toward measurable targets for government employees matters and creates a reason to look beyond intention. Targets are not quotas. Government parties already use quotas: Liberal preselection systems rely on internal rules that allocate voting power (non-gendered quotas) between groups, branches, delegates and party bodies. The Australian Labor Party uses internal affirmative-action rules for candidate preselection, including its 40:40:20 model, rather than legislated quotas.
Very distinctly, this article covers government workforce only (not the election of politicians) and targets only. Targets are:
- aspirational progress indicators
- used regularly to measure improvement in business and government
- visible and require leaders to ask: where is the inequality occurring, what is driving it, who owns the response, and what evidence will show whether change is actually occurring?
These same questions should apply across all public sectors.
Queensland’s experience shows why this work cannot wait
During my time as Director, Culture, Engagement and Diversity in one of Queensland’s largest workforces (95,000+), I advocated for a stronger, more visible approach to gender equity: one that connected workforce data, leadership accountability, inclusive culture and the everyday decisions that shape careers.
The Department’s Pathways to Parity strategy made an important point clear: a workforce can be predominantly female while leadership remains disproportionately male.
Women made up 79% of the workforce, yet men were overrepresented at senior officer and senior executive levels. Men represented fewer than a quarter of teachers but more than 40% of principals. Those figures demonstrate why broad workforce representation is not enough. The question is always: who progresses, who is visible, who is selected and who is assumed to be ready?
The publicly available strategy also recognised that gender equity requires more than aspiration: including gender audits, externally published accountability measures, leader capability, equitable recruitment practices and better data for hiring managers.
That is the practical work of parity.
The potential just in Queensland for this work? Queensland has 425,400 public-sector employee State Government jobs as of June 2025 (ABS, 2025).
The hiring manager is where policy becomes reality
Gender equality strategies can be beautifully written and still fail in the moment that matters most: when a manager decides who looks credible, capable, committed or like the “right fit”.
Bias is not always overt. It can appear in apparently ordinary comments:
- “She may not fit the culture.”
- “He has more leadership presence.”
- “She has not had the same breadth of experience.”
- “He seems more confident.”
- “We need someone who can hit the ground running.”
Each phrase may sound neutral. Yet, without structured criteria and capable decision-makers, they can become a vehicle for assumptions about gender, leadership, caring responsibilities, ambition and availability.
This is why hiring manager education cannot be treated as a compliance exercise or a once-off unconscious-bias module. Capability needs to be practical, repeated and connected to real decisions. Managers need to know how to:
- distinguish job-relevant evidence from subjective impressions
- recognise when “fit” is being used as a proxy for sameness
- write and test selection criteria for gendered assumptions
- use structured interviews and consistent scoring
- challenge narrow ideas of leadership potential
- understand how flexible work, career breaks and non-linear careers are interpreted
- use workforce data to identify whether selection outcomes are equitable
The aim is to recognise that good people can reproduce inequitable outcomes when systems leave too much room for unexamined judgement.
Targets are not the only answer
Well-designed targets:
- move the conversation from values to outcomes and make it harder to celebrate a policy while ignoring the data
- make it easier to identify where progress has stalled
- give leaders a reason to examine the machinery of recruitment, promotion, flexibility, remuneration and talent management.
Australian State and Territory public-sector workforces are complex, large and often highly regulated however the core principles are transferable:
- Publish meaningful workforce and leadership data
- Set measurable gender equality targets
- Require senior accountability for progress
- Build hiring-manager capability
- Analyse recruitment, promotion and acting-opportunity outcomes.
- Report publicly on what is changing and what is not.
All of government should be a model employer, not simply an observer of the standards expected elsewhere.
Other governments have already shown what this can look like
In New Zealand, the public service adopted Kia Toipoto, a pay-gap action plan requiring agencies to publish annual plans based on workforce data, set representation goals, address bias and improve career and leadership pathways. The approach combines transparency, agency-level accountability and practical action rather than treating gender equity as a stand-alone reporting exercise.
In the United Kingdom, individual government departments have set and publicly reported against representation targets. The UK Home Office, for example, set a target for women to comprise 48% of its Senior Civil Service and publicly reported that it had not yet reached it.
Governments can set measurable workforce goals, publish outcomes and make leadership accountable without confusing targets with quotas.
How does this relate to wellbeing?
Gender equity is often discussed as a representation, leadership or compliance issue but is also a workplace wellbeing issue. When women (or other outliers) repeatedly have to prove their competence, adjust their leadership style, explain career breaks, manage assumptions about flexibility, or work around opaque ideas of “fit”, the cost is not only slower progression; it’s friction, emotional labour and preventable strain.
This is why gender equity work cannot stop at asking women to become more confident, visible or resilient. Leadership programs, mentoring and capability-building can be valuable, but they do not remove the organisational conditions that require women to keep adapting (or men who also do not fit the dominant leadership style, or men who want to take parental leave or other career breaks).
Targets and public reporting matter because they make inequity visible. Hiring-manager capability matters because it changes the moment where wellbeing, opportunity and career progression can either be supported or quietly constrained.
The next question
WGEA’s new targets are a significant national reform by acknowledge that reporting alone is not enough; is Australia prepared to apply the same discipline to the employment systems that shapes so many Australian careers?
Gender equity advances when data is visible, targets are clear, leaders are accountable and hiring managers have the capability to practically redesign biased processes (Mitchell, 2018).
This is how intention becomes change.
References
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New Zealand Public Service Commission. (2021). Kia Toipoto—Public Service Pay Gaps Action Plan 2021–24. https://www.publicservice.govt.nz/assets/DirectoryFile/Kia-Toipoto-V8.pdf
New Zealand Public Service Commission. (n.d.). Pay gaps and pay equity. https://www.publicservice.govt.nz/system/public-service-people/pay-gaps-and-pay-equity
Parliamentary Library. (2021, April 19). Quotas for women in parliament. Parliament of Australia. https://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/Parliamentary_departments/Parliamentary_Library/Research/FlagPost/2021/April/Quotas_for_women_in_parliament
Queensland Department of Education. (2023). Pathways to parity workforce strategy 2023–2026: Accelerating the path to gender equity through inclusive, supportive and flexible workplace cultures. https://qed.qld.gov.au/workingwithus/induction/workingforthedepartment/humanresources/Documents/pathways-to-parity-workforce-strategy.pdf
Uhlmann, E. L., & Cohen, G. L. (2005). Constructed criteria: Redefining merit to justify discrimination. Psychological Science, 16(6), 474–480. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0956-7976.2005.01559.x