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About our data

This report uses data from duty holders for the 2021 and 2023 workplace gender audits under the Gender Equality Act 2020. Duty holders must report this data to the Commissioner every two years. This is part of their requirement to develop gender equality action plans and report on progress.

Other regulators such as WorkSafe Victoria can respond to cases of sexual harassment when a complaint is made. But we are the only regulator requiring public sector organisations to regularly report on sexual harassment. Regular reporting holds organisations to account. It also supports duty holders to proactively drive change to reduce sexual harassment.

Duty holders can update their audit submissions if they identify ways to improve or correct their data. This can lead to changes in the underlying data used in our reports. As such, data in this report may be different from previous releases.

We use three types of data:

  • Aggregated workforce data: Data already put together from organisations’ payroll and HR systems, shown mainly as headcounts. We used this for the 2021 audit (177 organisations that met quality standards).
  • Unit-level workforce data: Anonymous individual employee data from organisations’ payroll and HR systems. We used this for the 2023 audit (257 organisations that met quality standards).
  • Unit-level employee experience data: Anonymous individual data from the People matter survey1 for participating duty holder organisations in 2021 (106,069 people from 271 organisations) and 2023 (131,852 people from 276 organisations).2

Many public sector employees take the People matter survey, so small percentage changes can mean a large number of people have experienced a change.

Some of this audit data for each duty holder organisation is published on the Commission’s Insights Portal(opens in a new window) to support transparency, accountability and learning across the sector.

This report builds on our Baseline Report, which looked at 2021 data. Compared to 2021, the 2023 data includes more organisations and better data, especially from duty holders who were just starting their gender equality work in the first audit.

Where possible, we compared 2021 and 2023 data to find trends, track progress and highlight areas needing more attention. But there were some limitations:

  • In 2021, some duty holders’ data was too poor quality to use.
  • The 2021 audit happened during long COVID-19 lockdowns, which may have changed sexual harassment experiences and reporting.
  • Many duty holders and researchers still only collect gender data as male/female or men/women, limiting analysis for people with diverse gender identities.

Where we had enough data, we included insights beyond just the categories of women and men.

This report also uses research from across Australia and specific sectors to help understand our results and give evidence-based recommendations.

Footnotes

  1. The People matter survey is an annual employee experience survey administered by the Victorian Public Sector Commission. In every Gender Equality Act reporting year, around 90% of duty holders use the People matter survey to fulfil the employee experience data component of their workplace gender audit. For more information on the People matter survey and its use in data insights, see the methodology section of Intersectionality at work(opens in a new window).
  2. Data in this report is not comparable to similar data published by the Victorian Public Sector Commission (VPSC). VPSC collect data from all public sector organisations. We collect data from public sector organisations with more than 50 employees, as well as local councils and universities. The two Commissions’ workforce data collections are separate. And while we both use People matter survey data, we analyse a different selection of organisations. We also often make different calculations. As such, the results we publish are different. To learn more about recent data from the VPSC, visit the State of the public sector report(opens in a new window).

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