Photo by Morgana Magee

Mary Wooldridge (MBA 1994) has encountered gender discrimination in the workplace. “I think it’d be hard to find a woman in any workplace who didn’t have personal experiences of it,” she says. As director of Australia’s Workplace Gender Equality Agency, Wooldridge, who spent 13 years of her career in the Parliament of Victoria, has the data to back that up, too.

According to the agency’s most recent report card, which looks at pandemic-era employment between April 2020 and March 2021 in private companies with 100 or more employees, the total pay gap between men and women in Australia stands at 22.8 percent. That figure has consistently fallen since 2013 but, “at the current rate of change, we won’t close the gender pay gap for 25 years,” observes Wooldridge. “We need to speed things up.” Likewise, the proportion of women in CEO roles has increased steadily but, at the current pace, it will take 80 years to achieve parity.

“Everyone has a part to play in the solution,” concludes Wooldridge, who regards the small 35-person Workplace Gender Equality Agency not only as a resource for business but also as an advocate for societal change. Its current initiatives include a toolkit for companies that want to perform a gender-pay-gap audit and a campaign to encourage men to take parental leave, “because we know that changes the dynamic of who does what in the home, in terms of unpaid labor, and facilitates women returning to the workforce,” Wooldridge says.

There are also even bigger topics Wooldridge wants to address, such as desegregating Australia’s feminized and masculinized industries. “It’s a generational project to shift mindsets about traditional roles and traditional industries to drive gender equality,” she notes. “It has to be tackled at all levels: by employers and employee associations but also from kindergarten, so that young people are thinking and dreaming differently about their futures.”

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