Photo by Morgana Magee

Mary Wooldridge (MBA 1994) recalls a job interview early in her career in which the interviewer asked, “Why should I employ you? At your age, you’re just going to go off and have children.” At another position, she recruited a younger man to join the company, only to discover he was being paid more to do the same work as her. “I think it’d be hard to find a woman in any workplace who didn’t have personal experiences of gender discrimination,” she observes.

The knowledge that women across Australia have endured similar—and often far more extreme—discrimination in their careers has helped guide Wooldridge’s career in nonprofits and politics, including 13 years in the Parliament of Victoria, with three years as minister for women’s affairs and two years as shadow minister for jobs, innovation, and trade. After retiring in 2020, she accepted a role as director of Australia’s Workplace Gender Equality Agency, a position she calls “a very clear practice and policy leadership opportunity, backed by data.”

The government organization, established in 1986 as the Affirmative Action Agency, is tasked with promoting and improving gender equality in the workplace. In 2012, the agency was renamed and given a broad purview to collect data on equality metrics like composition, pay, policies, and practices from all private-sector employers in Australia with 100 or more employees, criteria that currently cover about 40 percent of the country’s workers. (The agency will soon expand to include the public sector in its data collection and analysis, expanding its reach to 60 percent of workers.) Almost a decade’s worth of data shows progress, says Wooldridge, but not enough. “In Australia, what we see is that we are making improvements, but the rate of change is exceptionally slow.”

According to the agency’s most recent report card, which looked at pandemic-era employment between April 2020 and March 2021, the total pay gap between men and women in Australia stood 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,” notes 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,” emphasizes Wooldridge, who sees 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 adds.

There are also even bigger topics Wooldridge wants to address, such as desegregating Australia’s feminized and masculinized industries. (Think health care, social assistance, and education versus mining, construction, and manufacturing.) “It’s a generational project to shift mindsets about traditional roles and traditional industries to drive gender equality,” she says. “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.”

The scope is daunting but, for Wooldridge, success will entail changing the conversation. “We can change hearts and minds,” she concludes. “For me, success will be shifting the conversation to new solutions, celebrating successes, and realizing the benefits that a changed workforce composition delivers.”

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