We’re Calling It: 2026 Another Sh*t Year For Gender Equality in Australia

11 minutes ago

5 min read

By Leah Morris, with expert commentary from Prue Gilbert.

Australia's gender equality progress is falling. Three major reports released in October exposed the extent of the leadership lag in Australian workplaces. One expert has solutions.

Before we dive in, a quick PSA. If women whining about inequality makes you scramble for the back button, skip to the change leaders’ cheat sheet at the end of this article.

Women's representation in ASX 200 executive leadership has declined for the first time in a decade (Chief Executive Women [1]).

Part-time work, parental leave and poorly designed career pathways are holding women back from leadership (BCEC | WGEA Gender Equity Insights 2026 [2]).

And inadequate workplace flexibility is driving experienced women out of the workforce (Working for Women[3]).

Additionally, about a third of Chief Executive Women members report growing opposition to gender equality, including organisations removing it from board papers (working in advertising, I can tell you International Women’s Day was also very quiet in recent years, with many blaming ‘the war on woke’).

Prue Gilbert, Founder and CEO of Grace Papers, believes there have been fundamental failures in how Australian businesses manage talent, leadership succession and workplace performance.

"Australia doesn't have a pipeline problem. It has a conversion problem. Women are in the workforce, and they are ambitious. What the data now shows, from the boardroom down to the first rung, is that careers stall at predictable control points: the first step into management, parental leave and return, and the midlife squeeze,” says Gilbert.

“Those points are run by individual manager discretion, not by design. That's a governance failure, and it has a commercial cost."

Good flex, bad flex

Businesses offer flexibility but fail to design careers around it. While 86.3% of employers offer part-time work, just 13.2% design management roles that can be performed part-time.

The ‘Working For Women’ report highlights that good flexibility provides workers with choice, security and career progression.

Bad flexibility involves employer-controlled reduced hours and restrictive rosters, particularly in female-dominated sectors including retail, health, education and care.

The research identifies how the quality of flexibility often depends on the attitude and discretion of an individual manager. Gilbert argues that the solution is to remove this lottery altogether:

"If whether you can progress depends on which manager you get, you don't have a policy. You have a lottery. Take the lottery out by designing roles, return pathways and promotion decisions so the outcome doesn't depend on goodwill."

Mind the gap

The national gender pay gap is 11.5% (ABS, February 2026). For every dollar men earned, women earned 88 cents. So, men in Australia are earning $12,854.40 more than women per year on average.

It’s also crucial to note that women with certain intersectional identities often earn much less. Age, ethnicity, disability and care responsibilities can all have a compounding effect on pay gaps.

For example, in 2025 First Nations women experienced a 23.7% income gap compared to non-Indigenous women, with a median personal income of $517.47 per week (Equality Institute).

This year’s average national pay gap percentile has only narrowed from 17.7% in 2016, or a total of 6.2% in a decade.

You might have heard this narrative: “But it’s because of all the women working casual and part time jobs, and women are saying they want more of those.” To me, this point of view demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of systemic inequity.

Workplaces need only employ enough different women to make up the hours of a full time role, and these part time workers won't widen their gaps. A very simple solution is job-sharing in leadership roles. Need a full time CTO? Put two women in the role and watch them thrive.

Social barriers

Trigger warning: men’s violence against women.

Another hurdle is making male dominated industries like construction, mining, transport, utilities and manufacturing safe for women. I have concerns about the realities of achieving this, when over a third of Australian boys aged 13-17 already believe attempts to give equal opportunities to women have gone too far (University of Melbourne, 2026).

But the most dire barrier to progress is the rampant terrorisation of women and girls by men. In 2026, family and domestic violence (FDV) related offences rose by 8 per cent since 2024 (ABS). At the time of writing this in early November 2026, 60 women and 28 children have been murdered this year (visit Australian Femicide Watch for the latest data). 49 of them knew their killers.

While 60% of Australian employers have policies to support employees experiencing family or domestic violence, I don’t see us achieving gender equality in a femicide crisis.

The change leaders’ cheat sheet

Here’s the must read bit.

If you’re in a policy or decision making role, you can help be the change by working with this easy checklist from Grace Papers:

Treat gender equity as a governance and commercial priority, with targets, measurement and executive accountability rather than relying on values statements.
Measure career progression, not just representation, examining hiring, first promotions, advancement and resignations by gender and employment status.
Design flexibility into leadership roles, so part-time work and caring responsibilities do not automatically restrict career progression.
Fix parental leave and return-to-work pathways, particularly the critical first 12 months after employees return.
Address the midlife talent loss, recognising the pressures experienced by women aged 40–55 at a crucial stage in the executive leadership pipeline.
Equip managers and hold them accountable, ensuring career opportunities do not depend on individual goodwill or discretion.
Make gender equality work for men too, supporting shared care, flexible careers and workplace cultures built on respect.

For Gilbert, the message is simple: businesses must stop measuring the success of gender equality by the policies they offer and start measuring what actually happens to their people.

The organisations that succeed over the next decade will be those that build accountability into the decisions that determine who progresses, who stays and who ultimately leads.

Contributing Expert: Prue Gilbert

Co-Founder, Grace Papers | Workplace Gender Equality Expert, Lawyer and Executive Coach

Prue Gilbert is a workplace gender equality expert, lawyer, executive coach and co-founder of Grace Papers. She specialises in translating gender equality commitments into practical changes that strengthen retention, career progression and leadership accountability.

Through Grace Papers, Prue partners with major employers across corporate, government and sporting sectors, combining workforce analytics with coaching for employees and their managers. Her work focuses on the moments when careers are most vulnerable to stalling - including parental leave, caring responsibilities and midlife transitions - and building leaders’ capability to prevent discrimination and sexual harassment.

A Fellow of the Governance Institute of Australia, Prue holds arts and law degrees from the University of Melbourne and a Graduate Diploma in Applied Corporate Governance. Her work has been recognised through the Australian Financial Review Women of Influence awards and LinkedIn Top Voice for Gender Equity. Grace Papers has received the Australian Human Rights Business Award.

Her Lead with Grace philosophy centres on using power with humanity, protecting dignity and making fairness practical in everyday workplace decisions.