- [Kathy] This is a recording of Workplace Gender Auditing training delivered by consulting partnership, GenderWorks Australia, in April and May, 2021 with funding from the Commission for Gender Equality in the Public Sector. This file is the second in a series of five recordings, focused on step two of your workplace gender audit process, getting your team on board. You can access the other four recordings in the series via the website of the Commission for Gender Equality in the Public Sector. My name is Kathy Oliver. My co-facilitator for these recordings is Jen Branscombe. We are principal partners at GenderWorks Australia. We've now delivered these sessions to more than 200 entities across the Victorian public sector. And this recording is a summary version of the materials delivered. Materials delivered in these sessions have been tailored to the mixed confidence and capacity levels of entity representatives. One of the first things we're looking at is getting your team on board, identifying who needs to be in your pool of relevant stakeholders and how, when and why they need to be engaged. As part of completing your workforce gender audit, you will need to engage a range of different systems holders from across your organisation. You are required to appoint a data custodian who will be responsible for ensuring that all the information that you require for your indicative reporting template is collected from across the organisation in a timely fashion and prepared to enable analysis, and then use within your gender equality action plan. You'll also be required to liaise with different systems owners from across the organisation, such as HR, payroll, recruitment, learning and development, OH and S and incident reporting. All of these different systems contribute to different indicators within the Gender Equality Act. For some organisations this will be a single point system, which will collect the information out of one system. For others it will be a range of different systems. And for other organisations, there will be information stored in individual computers and also on paper based versions. Each organisation is responsible for analysing where their information is stored and how they were collected, following June 30, to enable that information to be uploaded into the indicative reporting template. You will also need to consider how you'll be storing that information, and this may require the support of your IT department or your business units. And it will also need to ensure that all of your storage and use of this information complies with privacy legislation as well. As well as the systems holders that we've just identified, you'll also need to think about who in the organisation you will need to get on board, to enable you to develop your gender equality action plan. It is really important that you have discussions early on with your executive leadership and determine what their vision for gender equality in your organisation is. This will assist you as you go through the process of considering some of the other issues such as resourcing for your gender equality action plan. You are required to resource your gender equality action plan appropriately, and in line with the size of your organisation. You also need to consider issues of safety and developing distress protocols. We know that gender equality can raise issues for people at any time, at any level, and from any part of the organisation, ensuring that you have very clearly communicated with your employees, who they can talk to, in the event that they experience issues, but also ensuring that your employee assistance programmes can adequately handle these issues as well. It is up to your organisation to consider how the privacy implications interact with your gender equality action plan and how you will be sensitive to the collection and use of the information. We encourage you to consider completing a privacy impact assessment. In terms of legislation, you'll need to be mindful of any intersecting legislation that's relevant for your organisation. And this will depend on which sector your entity sits in. We also encourage you to consider an internal communications plan or strategy that goes across the whole of the gender equality action planning process. There are many different points you will need to communicate with people at all ranges and all levels within your organisation on a whole range of different issues, and we encourage you to plan this out in advance. Gender equality is an organisational change management programme and resistance is inevitable when you do work in this space. We do expect that resistance can take place within any one of us as an individual, we might have concerns about the work, or we might question the timing of the work, and we can also have resistance within our team as well. And also across our organisation more broadly, we might see resistance play out as well. The ways that we tend to see resistance play out when it comes to this type of work, is in relation really to completing tasks and activities. And it might be that people are too busy or don't feel that they have enough resources to do this work. And often this can be planning conversations around scheduling of this work and what it actually means to complete it. For other people, there will be a more philosophical resistance, that they don't believe in this work and they might question the value of using their time to promote gender equality within their workplace, there might be a perception that your organisation already has gender equality. You'll need to really think about these different types of resistance and plan for the ways in which you would respond to those kinds of questions or queries. We also see people experiencing resistance because some of these conversations can make us uncomfortable, now particularly when we're talking about gender inequality or some of the intersectional issues as well, that may come to light as you analyse your data. And it's really important to create safe spaces where people can have uncomfortable conversations and ask the questions that they need to ask, with a view to continuing to make progress as well. And one of the most significant pieces of resistance that we experience within organisation is apathy and a lack of follow through. So while somebody might say that they agree with gender equality, when it comes down to making a systems change or getting the information that you need, it might just be delayed, making it incredibly challenging, given the timeframes within which we are working under the Gender Equality Act. So just a reminder, this is a whole of organisational change management programme. Being aware that resistance is likely at various points and how we will deal with that is absolutely critical. We can plan for most of these points of resistance, whether it is responded to us by us as individual staff working within an organisation, or whether it's a leadership response, but planning is absolutely critical. This is a summary slide of the people you will need to engage when planning for your workplace gender audit. And it is critical that everybody involved in the process is aware of the Gender Equality Act and that undertaking a gender audit is a legislated requirement. It's also important that everybody is aware of the sensitivities of collecting gender desegregated and intersectional data, aware of the safety and the privacy concerns, and is respectful of this information as well. And it's also important that people within this group also understand the timeframes that you are working within, and that a gender equality action plan is required by October 31. And that there are a number of steps beyond just collecting this information from your systems, that will support you to meet that deadline. And that will include also your employee experience survey, that will go out to all employees across the organisation, and that you are required to undertake consultations as well, right across the organisation, as you develop those measures and strategies as well. This is an opportunity for you to pause and discuss with colleagues who may be watching this recording with you, or who you may be working with on the gender equality audit, to discuss sections one and two of the presentation. So the first question that we've got there is framed within the issues that we've already discussed. What are your concerns when thinking about undertaking the gender audit? For some people it'll be the availability of data, we know there'll be data gaps, the extraction of the data, who will actually do it? How long will this take? How will the systems get the information? For others, it's really going to be around the analysis of the information. And for some people, it's going to be a simple challenge of resources and time available, which is a very common experience across a range of entities. We'd also like you to consider what types of resistance you might see within your organisation. For some organisations, you might've been working on gender equality for quite a number of years, and this may be just the natural progression in that work. While for others, you may see a range of both direct and passive resistance. Do you anticipate people complying with the requirements under the Gender Equality Act? Do you anticipate that you will need to be really sort of strong in your approach? Or do you think there'll be more philosophical and active resistance around cultural components and greater conversations required as a result? This concludes section two of the Gender Audit Training presentation. Just a reminder, you can contact GenderWorks through LinkedIn or at www.genderworks.com.au or at auditing@genderworks.com.au. And you can also directly contact the Commission on enquiries@genderequalitycommission.vic.gov.au. Thank you.
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