International Women’s Day 2025 is a call to action.
As an Australian woman born in 1971 and now CEO and founder of a recruitment and HR outsourcing business, I have witnessed decades of progress—yet gender equality remains out of reach and is going to take approximately another 25 years to get there (Senator Katy Gallagher, Minister for Women, 2023).
The structures governing employment and career advancement continue to disadvantage women, particularly in high-income roles. It’s seriously time to stop talking about this and accelerate change NOW.
The Gender Pay Gap: A Deepening Divide
Despite claims of meritocracy, Australia’s gender pay gap exceeds 20% for salaries over $150K (WEGEA Reporting). This disparity exposes systemic failures in traditional hiring and compensation models. Women are still underpaid, undervalued, and underrepresented at senior levels. The status quo isn’t working—bold action is needed to dismantle these outdated structures.
Why Are Women Opting Out?
Rigid workplace norms force many women to step back from their careers. Hybrid roles, job-sharing, and flexible contracts remain rare, despite the clear need for structural support. The "motherhood penalty" persists, sidelining talented women and limiting their professional growth. Without meaningful reform, we will continue losing highly skilled professionals to a system that fails to accommodate their realities. And motherhood doesn’t refer to having children only, it relates to caring for older parents, sibling support and general community contribution – which occurs at various stages of our lives and fundamental to our human existence.
Rethinking the Employment Model
To achieve true gender equality, we must redefine how we engage talent. Flexibility, pay transparency, and equitable promotion structures must become the norm. Employers must embrace hybrid work and job-sharing as standard options—not exceptions. Without these changes, the gender pay gap will continue to widen, and female leadership pipelines will remain weak.
Barriers to Women’s Progression
Women continue to face systemic obstacles, including:
- Unconscious Bias: Leadership and hiring decisions still favour men.
- Lack of Sponsorship: Women struggle to access influential networks that propel careers forward.
- Outdated Workplace Cultures: Success is still measured by traditional, inflexible work models and promoting poor behaviours.
- Unaffordable Childcare: The high cost of childcare forces many women out of the workforce.
- Opaque Pay Structures: A lack of salary transparency enables wage gaps to persist.
A Collective Call to Action
To accelerate change, businesses and policymakers must commit to:
- Mandating Pay Transparency to close the wage gap.
- Normalising Flexible Work to retain and promote women.
- Encouraging Male Allyship to drive cultural change.
- Investing in Affordable Childcare to support working mothers.
- Redefining Performance Metrics to reward output, not outdated work models.
International Women’s Day is more than a celebration—it’s a demand for change. Gender equality cannot remain an aspiration; it must become reality. The next generation of women deserves workplaces that recognise their value, compensate them fairly, and support their ambitions. When women thrive, businesses, economies, and societies do too.
The time for action is now. I pledge to just DO BETTER, do you?
