A study drawing on employer data gathered by the Workplace Gender Equality Agency has found that while gender parity in the workplace has advanced over the past ten years, considerable room remains to better harness workforce capacity and lift business outcomes. The findings appear in the Gender Equity Insights 2026: Unlocking Australia's Workforce Potential report, published by the Bankwest Curtin Economics Centre.
According to the report, the share of women in paid employment has been climbing, with more moving into management-level roles. Participation rates at the leadership tier vary noticeably by sector, and data point to women departing those roles at a higher rate than their male counterparts. Qualified workers at the mid-career level continue to exit the pipeline before reaching senior roles, leaving a gap that organisations have yet to close.
According to BCEC's findings, two interconnected pressures drive women out of management positions: an unequal share of caring duties falling on women, and a broader shortage of flexible working arrangements available to employees of either gender at pivotal points in their professional lives.
Data from organisations where women hold chief executive and key management roles show a higher rate of flexible working arrangements, though researchers note the link does not establish that female leadership directly drives those policies. Among ASX-listed companies submitting data to WGEA, those with greater female representation at leadership levels tended to post stronger results across measures such as market capitalisation and returns to investors.
The report's co-author and BCEC Director, Professor Alan Duncan, indicated that the findings pointed to a need for closer examination of the full career pathway, noting that while women were being promoted at faster rates than men at multiple stages, that pattern did not carry through to the most senior levels, where men continued to hold a disproportionate share of leadership positions — a disparity he described as particularly pronounced in industries where women form the majority of the workforce.
Advancement data offer a window into which employees are moving forward in their careers. Mary Wooldridge — who leads WGEA and holds an OAM — noted that the data points organisations toward untapped internal talent, adding that employers broadly aim to attract capable people, retain them over time, and support their advancement through the ranks.
Wooldridge noted that examining the full talent pipeline — tracking entry, advancement, retention, and departure — offers a clearer picture of workplace dynamics, and that while women are gaining footholds in management, that upward movement tends to stall before reaching the most senior positions. Data can reveal precisely where and when that pattern breaks down, together with the underlying forces behind those inflection points and the actionable lessons available to organisations doing the hiring.
The report identifies what it terms a gap in the market where potential gains remain to be found. Workforce analytics, when applied with rigour, can reveal to organisations where staff are advancing, where they are departing, and where untapped ability may already exist within their own ranks. Hiring pipelines address only one dimension of workforce sustainability — how long people stay, the routes available for advancement, how roles are structured, and the flexibility of working arrangements all shape whether staff can build lasting careers.
The report further identifies what it terms a "male pedestal" pattern, in which men hold a disproportionately large share of senior positions relative to their overall representation within a given sector's workforce. A separate statement attributed to the report's authors argued that drawing on existing talent pools would advance both workforce planning and gender parity in the workplace.
Across sectors where women form the overwhelming majority of the workforce — Health Care and Social Assistance being a prominent example — men account for roughly 22 per cent of employees yet occupy close to half of all chief executive and business-head roles, a proportion that outstrips their workforce share by more than a factor of two. Professor Duncan noted that this pattern, which researchers have termed the "pedestal effect," prompts employers to weigh who leads a given industry against who actually staffs it, adding that numerical dominance within a sector does not translate into proportional representation at its upper levels, while the pairing of WGEA data with household-level analysis has opened up a richer understanding of how parenting shapes the trajectory of careers over time.
How a woman's workforce participation shifts after her first child depends heavily on the sector where she built her career. Survey data consistently show that household and caregiving tasks fall disproportionately on women, even in dual-income households where both partners hold full-time jobs.
Workplace data compiled for the report pointed to a gap in organisational policy on shared parenting, with just 11 per cent of employers having set a target to lift male uptake of parental leave. Co-author and BCEC Senior Research Fellow Dr Silvia Salazar noted that while the division of caring responsibilities at home falls outside employer control, workplace structures can be designed so that taking on parenthood does not derail an employee's path through the organisation.
While the vast majority of organisations — over nine in ten — provided flexible start and finish times in 2024–25, and 86 per cent accommodated part-time arrangements, just 13.2 per cent structured management positions in ways that made part-time hours workable at that level. Dr Salazar noted that making part-time work available differs considerably from building senior roles around it, and that when flexibility becomes harder to access further up the hierarchy, organisations may find their pool of potential leaders narrowing at precisely the point when experienced staff are positioned to step into those roles.
Recommended employer measures outlined in the report span several interconnected areas: monitoring how gender shapes outcomes across hiring, advancement, pay, and staff retention; auditing all components of remuneration — bonuses and incentives included; dismantling the structural obstacles that hold women back from senior roles while building succession pipelines that actively prepare them for leadership; reconfiguring management positions so they can be performed on flexible terms; and normalising parental leave uptake among men while reinforcing the pathways that support employees returning from leave and tackling the childcare and caring responsibilities that continue to constrain both workforce participation and longer-term career development.
