The approach in Australia to increasing women’s participation and achieving equal employment opportunity is multi-faceted. For this reason, it is difficult to measure the success of the EOWW Act and EOWA in isolation.
At the population level, a number of data sets are collected that provide information on the status of women within Australian workplaces. The Australian Bureau of Statistic’s Labour Force surveys, and Employee Earnings and Hours survey, are important in this regard.
At the organisational level, EOWA encourages organisations to measure their success in a variety of ways, and provides tools to help them gather data, identify issues for women workers and determine their priority areas to take action and measure outcomes.
Organisations use a number of indicators to chart the benefits of their programs, including increased productivity; reduced absenteeism and turnover, including the number of women who return to work after a period of maternity leave; improved rates of women in management and in non-traditional roles; increased access to quality part-time roles; and a decrease in or absence of discrimination-related complaints.
Organisations can also measure their equal employment opportunity successes by receiving a waiver of reporting requirements, which means they have achieved a ‘waived standard’. This means that they have done everything reasonably practicable to address issues for women in their workplace across all seven employment matters. Other measures of success for employers are becoming an EOWA Employer of Choice for Women or becoming a finalist or winner in EOWA’s annual Business Achievement Awards.
EOWA uses information it collects from reporting organisations to build a data set to measure progress in workplace programs over time. This data is also used to educate employers on best practice and is used to set and revise benchmarks for its EOWA Employer of Choice for Women citation.
EOWA measures its own performance through a survey of reporting organisations, which measures their views on the advice and information EOWA provides, its products and services, their relationship with EOWA, and the value they put on the legislation it administers.
This survey was last conducted in 2006, and prior to that in 2003. In 2006, this survey found that most reporting organisations thought EOWA effective in providing advice and information to assist in the improvement of outcomes for working women. More than two in five organisations believed EOWA to be ‘very effective’ or ‘extremely effective’. This represented an increase of 15 per cent from the 2003 survey 29.
Questions for consideration
- Are the mechanisms for measuring the effectiveness of the legislation and EOWA adequate? If not, how should they be improved?
- Is the EOWA data set adequate to measure changes in women’s participation and equality in employment? Could it be improved? If so, how?