By Megan Lilly, Deputy Commissioner, Jobs and Skills Australia
The United Nations Women 2025 theme for International Women’s Day is March Forward: For ALL Women and Girls.
I am proud to say Jobs and Skills Australia is ‘in step’ with this year’s theme as we recently released our Gender Economic Equality Consultation Paper and will release our groundbreaking Gender Framework shortly.
The Gender Economic Equality Capacity Study is analysing and exploring the intersections between two key policy challenges for progressing gender economic equality: horizontal occupational segregation and gendered divides, choices and outcomes across the education, training and skills systems.
We know Australia’s labour market and skills system is highly gendered and that this is a major contributing factor to both women’s economic equality and skills shortages.
To grow Australia’s workforce, we must address gender equity and equality and other intersecting areas of disadvantage such as cultural background, First Nations status, caring responsibilities, LGBTIQA+ identities, geography and disability across work and education.
JSA is well placed to undertake this work and provide economy wide analysis and more detailed categorisation of indicators for jobs that are mostly made up of women or men and monitor progress towards gender economic equality.
JSA’s access to linked education, training, tax and census information means we can analyse how much people get paid, what course they are studying, how old they are and other demographic factors like sex and migrant status. As a result, we provide critical insights into how the education, training and skills systems intersect and their impact on occupational segregation and other gendered labour market trends.
The JSA Gender Framework will embed gendered and intersectional analysis across our labour market and skills insights, policy development and stakeholders and potentially be a model to be adopted across the Australian Government.
JSA is well positioned to lead intersectional analysis and explore diverse labour market methodologies, indicators, and approaches.
Implementation of the framework is vital to JSA’s objective of achieving Australia’s full skills potential, supporting an inclusive and productive labour market and tackling disadvantage, exclusion, barriers, and safety issues within the workplace.
Having JSA identify gender differences and place intersectionality at the forefront of data collection, analysis and reporting will ensure detailed and accurate analysis of demographic data and that findings obscured in high-level gender analysis can be captured and considered.
These major gender equity initiatives are also in line with the Australian Government’s 10-year strategy, Working for Women – A Strategy for Gender Equity, especially Priority area 3: Economic equality and security, where one of the priorities is to address industry gender segregation and to measure and report on progress.
There is still much work to be done and JSA has a critical role in the national skills system, providing data and analysis that supports and elicits policy design, implementation, monitoring and evaluation.
JSA’s Gender Economic Equality Capacity Study and Gender Framework will contribute to advancing gender equality and making our economy stronger, more inclusive and more sustainable.
