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2022-25 Gender equality action plan: Department of Education

The department's Gender Equality Action Plan for 2022-25 (the action plan) affirms our commitment to promoting workplace gender equality, ensuring a gender equitable and respectful workplace for all staff in government schools and our corporate workplaces.

The action plan was developed following the completion of a workplace gender audit and extensive consultation with our government school and corporate workforces, as well as key stakeholders including employee representatives and staff-led networks.

This collaboration ensured the plan considered diverse perspectives and voices, with more than 15,000 department staff contributing.

The action plan sets out the department’s key focus areas to address gendered structural and cultural inequality in our workplaces. It has a focus on intersectional gender inequality, particularly the way in which attitudes towards identity characteristics such as age, sexuality and disability can exacerbate gender inequality.

The annual implementation plans have specific initiatives and priorities to progress our commitments in the action plan.

Moving into the final year of implementation, the 2024 and 2025 Implementation Plan will build on the progress made since 2022 with a focus on embedding and establishing gender equality as everyone’s responsibility, addressing systemic and cultural barriers and resistance, and monitoring and driving continuous improvement.

The department’s baseline data comes from the workplace gender audit conducted in 2021, which measures the department’s progress against the Commission for Gender Equality in the Public Sector’s (the Commission) workplace gender equality indicators(opens in a new window). To view audit data, please visit the Commission’s Insights Portal(opens in a new window).

The data from the 2021 audit has informed the development of the 4-year plan and points to areas where action is needed to address imbalances.

Audit reports have been produced periodically across the life of the plan to help us track our progress and identify where to focus our future actions in our annual implementation plans.

Where we want to be

The focus of the work is to:

  • Promote equality in the composition of our workforces
  • Reduce the gender pay gap
  • Ensure a safe, inclusive and respectful workplace for all staff.

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