Gender Equality Action Plans
About this Episode
In this episode of DEI Will Not DIE, Dr Bree Gorman takes a critical look at gender equality and gender equality action plans; where they’re helping, where they’re falling short, and how they can unintentionally widen privilege gaps when intersectionality is treated as an afterthought.
While recent legislation in Victoria has driven stronger accountability around gender equality, Bree explores the unintended consequences they’ve seen first-hand: organisations being forced to backtrack from more holistic, intersectional DEI work to meet narrow compliance requirements. Bree argues that when gender is prioritised without an intersectional lens from the start, organisations risk centring the experiences of white, straight, able-bodied women while leaving others further behind.
This episode challenges organisations to shift away from “fixing people” programs and toward meaningful system change, even when the data isn’t perfect and the work feels uncomfortable.
What You'll Learn
How to incorporate an intersectional lens into your Gender Equality plans.
How gender equality action plans can unintentionally increase privilege gaps.
The challenges of compliance-driven approaches.
The difference between fixing systems vs fixing people, and why system change should be the priority.
Resources Mentioned
Build inclusive workplaces by empowering leaders:
https://www.breegorman.com/training/inclusive-leadership-workshop/
Follow for more on LinkedIn
Keep Learning & Connect With Bree
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[00:00:00] Is DEI dead? Not even close. I'm Bree Gorman and this is DEI Will Not Die the podcast for people doing the real work of inclusion. Whether you're leading a team shaping DEI strategy or just trying to make change that lasts. You're in the right place. We will cut through the fluff and dig into practical insights that will help you lead with clarity, courage, and impact.
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Well, let's welcome back to season two. It feels like such a blur season one. I finally, after years of thinking about a podcast, did it. Recorded a season, and now I'm into season two. I'm really enjoying this and thank you to those of you who have been [00:01:00] listening in and providing me with some feedback.
Really appreciated that. If you haven't caught season one, go and have a listen, but don't feel that this is a podcast that you need to listen to every episode. They're all totally independent episodes, so just check the topics that interest you and let me know if there's topics and guests that you'd like me to.
Highlight or feature in this season or seasons to come. We are really interested in receiving your feedback and being able to deliver content that is useful and practical in a space that is sometimes, sometimes I feel that we drown in. A lot of noise and a lot of talk and not a lot of practical useful information and hold me to account if I'm creating episodes that are too fluffy and didn't really give you what you needed in terms of how we do diversity, equity, and inclusion work, let me know.
I'm really keen to hear from you and improve this as we go along and, and make it our podcast as much as mine. [00:02:00] Today's episode, I wanna focus on gender equality action plans, and in the jurisdiction that I'm in, there is legislation in Victoria in Australia. I'm currently based on Wadderang Country, which is the traditional owner name for the land that I live, work, and play on.
But recognising that this legislation around gender equality action plans in the state of Victoria exists across multiple indigenous nations. I wanna talk about this gender equality action plan today. Even if you are not Victorian, even if you're not in the public service, and, and subject to this, because there's great learnings from this process for people doing diversity, equity, and inclusion work across the globe.
It is a legislated mandated process that any public service organisation in Victoria is required to create a gender equality action plan. Now [00:03:00] that action plan is typically a four year plan. Progress reports are required from the legislative body on a regular basis, and there's quite a process, a prescriptive process as to how you create the plans and also what the plans look like.
The template that you use. It involves a quite detailed workplace audit that occurs annually to reflect on progress and to monitor progress against the plan. And there's a number of key indicators that the legislation focuses on for organisations. It really is focused on gender equality. I think in reality the plans are about gender equity, which is a good thing, and there is a shift to try and make these more intersectional.
I'm gonna say upfront my controversial hot take, and I don't think it's actually probably that controversial. I think people are pretty much in the sector widely in [00:04:00] agreement with the fact that leading these and naming them as gender equality action plans has absolutely created what I would call a bigger privilege gap between those who have and those who don't.
In workplaces in this state, particularly around the fact that intersectionality. Really is not built in from the beginning. It's kind of been a tack on at the end. And that's created some practices and it's created, you know, initial action and energy around gender that could have been intersectional in nature, but wasn't because of the way that this was structured.
So, sorry if I'm offending people there, I do think there's a lot of great things about this process and I'm gonna talk to them. But there's also some things that I think are problematic and on reflection could probably have been dealt with a little differently, so that we can take an intersectional lens from the beginning rather than [00:05:00] an afterthought, which is what I think many organisations are doing.
Mostly because I don't feel too comfortable in the intersectional lens space and the kind of given permission to stick the majority of their work into that gender equality bucket. So that's what these gender equality action plans are, just as much as they're legislated for Victorian public service organisations.
As an organisation, you could also have a gender equality action plan, and this episode's gonna talk about them. You know, more broadly, I advocate for organisations having a diversity, equity and inclusion framework. That does start with an intersectional lens that then, sure, we might have some specific programs of work that sit under that framework that look to delve into the nuances of people's experiences.
But if we can start from a more holistic diversity, equity, and inclusion lens, there's a number of advantages to that. And so I'm [00:06:00] obviously not talking about that today. I wanna talk specifically about these gender equality action plans. But that's my, my opinion on, you know, the validity of this process and the timing of the process and how perhaps I would think about doing it differently if you're not constrained by this process and this legislation.
So what are kind of some of the downsides of having a legislative process for a gender equality action plan for public service organisations? And for me, one of the big things that I've seen is organisations who were already quite progressive, who had had gender equality plans for a long period of time, who have had LGBTIQA plus plans, who had moved into a space where they were looking at things more through an intersectional lens.
With broader, holistic diversity, equity, and inclusion plans, some of them actually have had to backtrack their work a little to meet the requirements of this legislation. And interestingly, universities [00:07:00] were included in this requirement to create these plans, which I think was a mistake. Now, I heard some talk at the beginning that universities were included because.
They were more progressive and at the forefront and would be able to provide some really great examples for other organisations to learn from. That could be true. And also, I think in many cases it has actually hindered the work that some universities were doing because you've now got more tick boxes that need to be completed.
And I haven't seen organisations adding resources to deal with these requirements. I've just seen them redirecting people's attention and effort that's in an environment where. Cost of living has increased, organisations have had to tighten their belts, particularly in the university sector. And so we were going to see a, I guess a retraction in the size of diversity, equity, and inclusion teams.
Anyway, so we've seen that. [00:08:00] Yet we've seen the obligations increase. So what's happening is a lot of the good work that was being undertaken has had to be paused while organisations meet their requirements around multiple different levels of legislation and accreditation programs I've talked about.
Gender equity being a bit of a barrier itself, that we might be narrowing expectations. And what I mean by that is it's not that we shouldn't be focused on gender inequalities. Of course we should. They exist, but we need to be very mindful of the fact that these plans don't just prioritise and privilege white, straight able-bodied women.
Who are perhaps a bigger cohort in the organisation, a louder cohort in the organisation, and you know, we start tinkering around the edges rather than dealing with what we know to be quite significant. Pay gaps for women of color, for aboriginal women, for [00:09:00] some, you know, experiences of discrimination, harassment, and bullying, still being higher for LGBTIQA plus women and gender diverse folks in an organisation.
Women with disability absolutely missing out on leadership roles. So we know all of this and these things to me are almost need to be more important than just increasing the number of women in leadership as a general statement, when we get it right for queer Black First Nations women with a disability.
Then we're probably getting it right for the majority of the organisation. We've probably introduced a whole bunch of things that help everybody, and we're not ignoring the systemic racism, the systemic ableism that's built into our systems. So we can achieve that within a gender equality action plan structure.
But we have to be very intentional about it. And that means collecting data beyond gender, of course, but also being more creative and. [00:10:00] How do I say it? Maybe even a little less rigorous with our measurements. So I see organisations prioritise, let's say, representation of women in leadership roles because they can measure women.
They can't necessarily, not all organisations are currently measuring cultural diversity. And so if we can't measure it, then we're not managing it at all. And I think in this space we've gotta get better at managing things that maybe we can measure, but not as well as we would like to. I think we need a little bit more nuance.
We need to be a little bit more comfortable with imperfect data sets. Give us an indication that we should try something and then trying an action, seeing if we are seeing a difference or some progress around that. And if not, try something else. I think we have to become a little bit more imperfect about the work that we do.
I'm noticing myself, this episode is getting quite deep and detailed, so I hope [00:11:00] that's working for you. Please reach out with any questions and kind of skimming over some stuff that you need a bit more explanation on. One of the other ways I think gender equality action plans can be problematic, and this goes across all inclusion and diversity and equity action plans, is have a look at who's responsible for your actions.
I look at many plans and I count them how many of the actions within the plan are attributed to HR or people and culture. Now, if it's more than 80%, that's not organisational change. Those actions might be needed. They might be very valuable. Well thought through going to be evaluated well, but this work needs to be about engaging the whole organisation and that means doing some of the harder work, not just taking the easier wins.
It's very easy to say that our people and culture team will create a mentoring program. It's very easy to say that we will review the recruitment process [00:12:00] could be very useful actions depending on your data and your context, but I think there's also a lot of value in making sure that there's actions in that plan that sit under the responsibility of the chief financial officer that sit under the responsibility of the facilities manager, the marketing manager.
Why isn't the marketing director or manager responsible for a large number of actions within a diversity, equity and inclusion plan? These plans fall over because of a lack of good communication plans, frameworks. That needs to be built into the plan. How are we gonna tell people about this work? How are we gonna find out from people whether the work's been successful or not?
What's the language that we're gonna start using across the organisation? Communications matters. So, you know, having a quick sense check. Of the actions and who's responsible for them. And you know, if we need to rethink some of these actions to make sure that we are covering all of the organisation, then we do that because everybody needs to be [00:13:00] engaged and involved for this to create, wide scale culture change across an organisation.
The other thing we need to watch for is how we're measuring our actions. We should be looking at two things. One is that the actions actually get done. That does need to be measured. People say to me, oh, but that's not measuring impact. No, it's not, but most plans don't get implemented. So we need to have a strong mechanism to make sure we are holding people to account for the actions that they've agreed to.
So that's definitely one type of measure that the thing got done. The other measure has to be how are we measuring the impact of this? And this isn't always simple. People think, and I'll have clients come back to me. You know, very adamantly saying we need to measure impact. What impact measures can we put against these actions?
And honestly, some of the actions in the diversity, equity and inclusion plan are very, very difficult to measure impact because they're one cog in a [00:14:00] bigger wheel that's looking to drive change. So, for example, if I'm gonna put an action in that's around, you know, developing a gender affirmation guide and process to generate more positive experiences for employees when they do transition or affirm their gender in the workplace.
Great. Success measures absolutely might be around trans and gender diverse people's sense of inclusion and belonging in the organisation. Sense of safety, but you might not be able to measure that 'cause you might not yet have enough people who are trans and gender diverse, who are contributing to your surveys or your focus groups to give you that information.
So what do we do? We don't kill the action, right? We're gonna have to get more creative. We're gonna have to be a little bit more comfortable with uncertainty. We know that this is a good, useful thing to do. And maybe here [00:15:00] initially the outcome is just yet that we did it. And then maybe as we get people accessing that process and that policy, then perhaps we can collect feedback.
We can create qualitative data based on the experiences people that have in. And we might see eventually, we now have more people who feel safe. Affirmed to say that they're trans in the organisation and then we can start measuring and tracking data and experiences. So I just want us to remember that this is more nuanced and.
I'm a huge data nerd, but we can't always measure everything perfectly from the beginning, so we need to be a little flexible in the way that we set our measurement and success impact measures. Alright. One other thing I wanna say that I think is really important is looking at the actions that you might have in your gender equality action plan.
DEI plan, I think I've spoken to this before. Go and have a look, how many of them are [00:16:00] about fixing the systems and how many of them are about fixing the people? I think there's probably some room in these plans to have some actions that are around. People development and focus, and I think that's okay.
Also, usually say rather than, let's spend a hundred thousand dollars on a development program for women, which I'm not a fan of, maybe this is a reverse mentoring program that does give some opportunity for development for staff. Also gives opportunity for leadership to learn in the process. However, majority of times I want you to shift away from programs and into system change.
For example, maybe if I am looking at workforce structure and I'm looking at progression in an organisation, maybe I'm looking at understanding the typical pathway that people take into a leadership role within the organisation. Do they get recruited externally in. Do they move up through the organisation?
And if so, what's kind of the [00:17:00] average time that somebody might move from an entry level role to a leadership role? And let's look at the demographics around that. We did that with one university and what we saw that was women and particularly women of colour had a much longer. Time, and I don't know what you wanna call that time, but a much longer time sitting in non-leadership roles than their male white counterparts.
So that length of time that your progression journey takes in an organisation is important to understand. And people might say, oh yeah, because the majority of women have taken some parental leave or worked part-time, so naturally it's gonna take longer. The whole point of parental leave and the whole point of gender equality work is that there isn't a penalty for doing those things.
There isn't a penalty for having to take on the majority of the domestic and family responsibilities. That's meant to be the goal, so let's not explain it away as that's the answer. That [00:18:00] might be why, so then let's reflect and look well, what's happening to people? Do they not feel that they can take on leadership roles?
Because actually there's no leadership roles in our organisation that are available part-time or job share. That's a system change that needs to occur, we have to have flexible working in our leadership roles and our leadership structures, and job share is a great tool as well that we can use. So I'm just trying to shift you into that mindset that we are thinking about system change.
We are not thinking about programs that might build someone's skills. That's important in our broader career development progression framework within our organisation that needs to really seriously consider inclusion and diversity. But in our gender equality action plan, let's focus on what the barriers are that are in the system and what they are and how we might remove them.
So another episode I'm gonna do this season is definitely around targets and quotas. [00:19:00] So hold me to that and keep an eye out. I will make sure I send that, I do an episode on that as well, because that's relevant to this topic. Interested in your thoughts, questions. What else would be useful to hear about gender equality action plans?
I know a lot of my listeners are going through this. Whether you are in the Victorian public service, or even whether you are externally throughout the country or in other countries, you are also creating these plans. Really keen to hear from you. And that's it for another episode of DEI Will Not Die.
We'll see you in the next one.
Well, that's it for today's episode of DEI Will Not Die. Want more resources and support to do the work? Well, why don't you visit breegorman.com and don't forget to follow or share this episode with someone who cares and maybe also someone who [00:20:00] should.