[Music] Welcome everyone my name is Stacey Star.
Today we're covering how to complete your progress reports under the Gender Equality Act. Our session will provide you with an overview of what's required, why it's important, and how it can truly make your workplace fair and more inclusive for all employees. By the end of this presentation our aim is for you to be confident in completing your progress reports.
I'd first like to acknowledge the traditional owners. Our offices are held on the lands of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation and I wish to acknowledge them as traditional owners. I would also like to pay our respects to the elders past and present and Aboriginal elders of other communities who may be here today. In this session we'll provide an overview of progress reports; we'll speak about getting started with our guide and our template; we'll speak about reporting on gender impact assessments; reporting your progress against the seven workplace gender equality indicators reporting on your GEAP strategies; and submitting and publishing your progress reports.
First though, I'd just like to hand over to our Commissioner Dr Niki Vincent to say a few words.
Thank you Stacey, hello and welcome.
Progress reports are a core requirement under the Gender Equality Act. Every two years duty holders must assess the impact of their gender equality action plans and their gender impact assessments. This isn't just a reporting task it is a moment to reflect on what's working, what's not, and what must change. Reporting helps us stay accountable, it builds momentum and it fuels meaningful improvement across the public sector. To meet compliance your progress report must show reasonable and material progress. I know many of you feel under resourced but your work matters. It contributes to building fairer stronger more inclusive workplaces. This webinar will help you meet the standard with clarity and confidence.
Thank you for that now let's get started because we have a lot to cover. Let's begin with an overview of progress reports.
What is a progress report? Progress reports are a way of checking the success of gender equality action plans and tracking gender impact assessments. Progress reports must include key information about gender impact assessments that you've undertaken, they also must demonstrate progress on the seven workplace gender equality indicators or justify why progress has not been made using your audit data and they must describe progress on the measures and strategies that out in your gender equality action plan. Why complete a progress report? Progress reports help us to know where we are making progress and where we need to focus more effort. They are an obligation under the Gender Equality Act they also help you determine the best strategies and measures for your next gender equality action plan and gender impact assessments also help to eliminate systemic causes of gender inequality in policy programs and services for the community. We will we will speak a little bit more about gender impact assessments in the coming slides.
First let's talk about timing. You're required to submit a progress report every two years with the next one due on the 1st of May 2026. Your next progress report if relevant and GEAP are due 1st of May 2026. If you're doing a progress report the relevant reporting period is the 1st of July 2023 to the 30th of June 2025 except for universities which I'll get into shortly. As part of your progress report you will need to report on your gender impact assessments undertaken during the relevant period, your progress against the seven indicators, and a summary of your GEAP strategies. Keeping on top of these dates ensures you remain compliant and can plan your internal data collection efforts effectively. Progress reports and high level gender equality data for every defined entity or duty holder will be published on the Commission's public insights portal.
Universities have a different reporting timeline, this aligns with their existing reporting obligations under the Workplace Gender Equality Act 2012 Commonwealth. The reporting period for universities 2025 progress report is the 1st of April 2023 to the 31st of March 2025.
Let's now look at the relationships between the obligations.
This slide provides a visual of the relationship between each of the obligations. You can see here the reason the audit comes before the progress report and before the gender equality action plan is because your audit informs your gender equality action plans and your progress reports. This shows a timeline of how each obligation informs and is related to the other.
There are four main steps to completing your progress reports while there are a lot of details in each step the template and guidance provides detailed instructions around what is required. Step one reporting on gender impact assessments. Reporting on the policies programs and services that were subject to a gender impact assessment or GIA and that the the actions taken as a result of those GIAs. Next, the workplace gender equality indicators demonstrate your organisation's progress in relation to the indicators. Then, gender equality action plan strategies. You need to report your organisation's progress in relation to the strategies listed in your gender equality action plan. And, finally the submission and publication. You need an attestation by the head of your organisation. This means the head of your organisation needs to sign off before you submit and publish. During the rest of the webinar we will provide an overview of your reporting requirements in each of these steps.
Getting started with our guide and templates.
There have been changes to the guidance and the template which have all been informed by consultation with duty holders and other key stakeholders. You must use the template provided by the Commissioner. This is a requirement of the Gender Equality Act. You can download the 2026 progress report template from our website. This guidance will help your organisation complete and submit a progress report. There are required and recommended items to include in each section of the progress report. You must include all the required items the recommended items are also strongly encouraged. Supporting documents will not be accepted. All information must be included in the progress report template. If you would like to include additional information you may do this in any other additions or comments section at the end of the template.
There is also a checklist at the end of the guidance to ensure your progress report complies with the Act. The cover page is new in 2026 and most of the cover page is recommended. The attestation though is required. Your head of organisation the CEO or equivalent must attest that they approve the progress report and that your organisation has completed all relevant gender impact assessments under the Gender Equality Act
Just to cover off the cover page it is new and it has been created to ensure any important contextual information is upfront. The contextual information that we want to know is whether there was anything that affected your progress towards gender equality and your ability to make reasonable and material progress on the workplace gender equality indicators in the Act. You may wish to discuss the factors in section 16.2. of the Act. These are the factors that the commissioner considers when determining whether a duty holder has made reasonable and material progress you will also have an opportunity to discuss these in the workplace gender equality indicator section of your progress report if applicable you can copy and paste some or all of the same information in both sections of the progress report and we really want to know if any of the factors listed limited your progress on any of the seven indicators please tell us.
Reporting on gender impact assessments.
Step one is about reporting on gender impact assessments undertaken during the relevant reporting period. You're required to undertake GIAs on policies programs and services that have a direct and significant impact on the public. This step includes 1.1 which is gender impact assessment exemptions. Permitted reasons for exemptions are listed in the guidance. There may be good reason why your organisation will not be reporting on any GIAs. The progress report includes 1.2 describing policies programs and services subject to a GIA. You will be required to identify and describe all policies program and services that were subject to a gender impact assessment. 1.3 Describe actions taken you will also need to confirm what actions were taken as a result of conducting the gender impact assessment. We have some great resources and case studies on our website around GIAS as well which are all designed to help you with these reporting your progress against the indicators.
Step two is about describing progress against the workplace gender equality indicators let's take a moment to outline the seven indicators. These are at the heart of the Gender Equality Act. They represent the key areas where workplace gender inequality persists. This section in the template is a table that you need to fill out the table and the guidance explains how to do this. Ultimately, the aims of this step are to demonstrate where progress has been made to the Commissioner and to your key stakeholders. If you have not made progress it helps to justify why and it should also help you to shape your strategies in your next GEAP. This step is reporting on progress against the indicators the key action under this step is completing your workplace gender audit and analysing the data describing progress against the workplace gender equality indicators and then 2.2 describing factors contributing to or inhibiting progress audit data.
Completing the audit and analysing the data before completing the indicator section of the template you must undertake a workplace gender audit.
This means collecting and analysing your audit data. You do this by collecting and submitting your 2025 audit data to the Commissioner and comparing this with your last audit from 2023. I won't go into too much detail now as we go through this in more detail in the workplace gender audit presentation. The guidance for the audit is also available on our website.
We have now introduced performance measures.
This is data that you already collect as part of your audit. You don't have to collect anything new but the performance measures help you understand where to start when analysing your data. This section of the progress report is where you describe how you've made progress on each indicator or why you've not made progress and the performance measures can help you do that clearly.
The performance measures come pre-filled in the template so you just need to add your 2023 and 2025 data against each measure. These measures set out the minimum expectation for what data you should use to describe your progress against each indicator. Using the performance measures helps you to see the connections across different parts of your audit data. It will also help you drive and assess progress. You can achieve compliance if you choose to use other measures, however the Commissioner prefers that you use these performance measures. This is because they are minimum data points to understanding gender inequality and they also help you to understand where to start. They help you to focus on the most important data. You collect a lot of data points as part of your audit so we've made it easier for you by telling you which measures are best to demonstrate progress against each indicator and they are simple and straightforward making it easy to talk with your stakeholders about your gender equality progress. There are two types of measures. The critical measures are considered the minimum to understand gender inequality in your organisation and the supplementary measures are great if you have the capacity for further analysis. Providing data against supplementary measures gives you an even better understanding of gender inequality at your organisation. If your organisation is more progressed in its gender equality journey you can use other measures and data as well as the performance measures.
For section 2.2, we want to know what is limiting or contributing to your progress against each indicator. For the progress against the indicators part of the progress report, there are two ways to meet compliance. Either your data and your explanation of the data show that you have made quantitative progress in relation to an indicator, or your data and explanation do not show that you've made progress but you use these factors to adequately justify why or how you attempted to make progress. If you have made quantitative progress on an indicator you do not need to complete this section simply write non-applicable in the relevant column if you have not made quantitative progress you will need to complete this section. The template will ask you what factors may have limited your progress and then to explain them. For example, you may be a very small organization of say 54 employees that experienced a major flooding event during the relevant period. In this case you may wish to talk about the first two factors and how they impacted your progress on that indicator. The template will also ask you to list the strategies that are aligned to each indicator. You don't need to describe your strategies further, you can simply just list the strategies here. The purpose of this is for you to show how you have attempted to drive progress on each of the indicators. It may be that you've put some great strategies in place but if you have not yet seen a positive change in your data. Sometimes shifting the dial on gender equality takes time and sustained commitment.
Reporting on your GEAP strategies.
The last step of the template is reporting on your GEAP strategies. While you've listed strategies against each indicator in the previous section, this step aims to summarise at a high level what wasn't completed and anything you would like to highlight.
For section 3.1 summarise strategies you did not complete and why. You don't need to list each individual strategy, just a summary will suffice. For example, you might say that eight strategies were cancelled and two are still in progress explaining briefly why the decision was made to cancel and why there are two strategies ongoing.
Section 3.2 is a chance for you to highlight and celebrate what you've achieved, the challenges you faced, and your learnings along the way. Challenges and learnings are not only important for developing and implementing your next GEAP but it's also about sharing knowledge on what has and hasn't worked.
Section 3.3 is for any other updates you wish to share about implementation. And section 3.4 is for you to summarise the resourcing of your GEAP it's about you reflecting on how much resourcing was given to this work and asking was it enough. Do we need to change resourcing in the next cycle to ensure that we give it the best chance at success.
Finally, submitting and publishing your progress report.
You will need to submit your progress report using the 2026 progress report template. You need to submit the completed template via the reporting platform and supporting documents will not be accepted. In regards to publishing, you can choose to either publish as soon as reasonably practicable after submission which means before this Commissioner's compliance assessment, or you can wait to publish after the Commissioner has notified you of the compliance outcome of your progress report. The Commissioner expects duty holders to publish progress reports within 3 months of notification of compliance outcomes. The Commissioner will publish progress reports on the insight portal.
A few practical strategies can make a huge difference when completing progress reports. First, start early so you're not rushing days before the deadline. Collaboration and early engagement is equally important. Pull in your teams from human resources or people in culture payroll and data folks but also get leadership buy in as early as possible so everyone understands why this matters. If you have a gender equality working group, you have a group of champions to help you with the engagement and sharing the why. Also allow time for submission sign off from relevant committees key stakeholders and final approval and attestation from your head of organisation.
Further learning and support. We've developed other on demand webinars to help you with your obligations these include introduction to the Gender Equality Act, conducting an audit, and gender equality action plans. We will also be holding drop-in sessions for each of the obligations. Communities of practice for your industry is another great resource and of course you can contact us for further support at enquiries@genderequalitycommission.vic.gov.au.
Lastly, please keep in touch please visit our website which has all the new obligation guidance. You can follow us on LinkedIn and you can subscribe to our newsletter thank you so much for listening today and we hope that this is helpful in helping you to do your next progress report.
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