International Women's Day 2025: Taking steps towards gender parity in frontline workplaces

In its purest form DEI is about ensuring that everyone feels included and is set up for success, regardless of gender, race, sexuality, age, and so on. It’s about creating a sense of belonging and genuine connection for each and every person — and this year International Women’s Day seeks to increase the momentum towards gender equality. 

‘Accelerating Action’ towards gender equality 

In the context of gender equality, gender parity refers to the equal contribution of women and men to every dimension of life, whether private or public. According to data from the World Economic Forum, it would take until 2158 to achieve full gender parity at the current rate — that’s five generations from now.  

This forecast highlights the responsibility that falls on us as a collective society to strategise, allocate resources, and participate in activities and initiatives that help close the gap between men and women. 

This year’s International Women’s Day theme, 'Accelerate Action’, speaks to the desire to break down the systemic barriers and biases that women face, in both personal and professional spheres. In our everyday lives, we can ‘accelerate’ this change by calling out traditional stereotypes and challenging any discourse that encourages discrimination. We can do the same in the workplace, while also questioning bias and celebrating women’s success. In doing so, we advocate for gender parity and therefore, equality.  

However, achieving equality is a marathon, not a sprint — and as the statistics show, there’s still work to do before parity is achieved. 

Gender imbalances around the world 

According to Australia’s Workplace Gender Equality Agency (WGEA), in 2024: 

• Australia's gender pay gap is 21.8%   

• For every $1 men earn, women earn 78c  

• Women, on average, earn $28,425 less than men each year 

• Just 21.9% of nationwide CEOs are women 

• The CEO/Heads of Business gender pay gap is the largest of all manager categories at 27%. Even when women secure a senior leadership role, they are paid less than their male counterparts 

• Female dominated industries (such as Health Care and Social Assistance) have a lower average remuneration compared to the overall average 

In recent years, New Zealand has made notable progress in closing the gender pay gap. The gender pay gap currently sits at 8.2%, down from 12.2% in 2018. From a leadership perspective however, women remain underrepresented. Despite 41% of Public Service leadership roles being held by women, just six out of 179 companies listed on the NZX are headed by female CEOs.

In the UK, the gender pay gap has fallen by approximately a quarter for all employees (full-time and part-time) over the past decade. As of 2024, the gap sits at 13.1% — a slight decrease from 14.2% the year before, according to the Office for National Statistics.  

Different UK research shows that as of 2024, just 11 female CEOs led companies on the FTSE 100. There was also a massive £768,439 disparity in average wages between these female CEOs and their male counterparts.  

While we can acknowledge the acceleration of progress in recent years, there’s still plenty of work to be done. For this reason, International Women’s Day remains an important date every year for women — and society as a whole — in the fight for equality.

How Humanforce supports the push for gender parity    

Humanforce’s mission is to make work easier and life better for frontline, or ‘deskless’ workforces. Deskless workers make up 80% of the world’s working population across industries like Aged Care, Healthcare, Childcare & Early Learning, Retail and Hospitality, yet are often overlooked and under-served compared with their white-collar peers. Additionally, many of these industries are comprised of majority-female workforces, such as Childcare & Early Learning.

Deskless workers face unique challenges which makes bringing equity to their work – and life – difficult. Often, they are working odd hours and many of them may feel disconnected from everyone else in their team. Building sustainable careers and accessing learning & development can be difficult – and especially so for marginalised groups. In addition, HR is often physically distanced from the frontline and may struggle to deliver the support and services required.  

Humanforce is looking to level up the playing field and bring greater equity to these individuals by giving them access to the tools, benefits, flexibility and learning opportunities they need to excel in their jobs, regardless of their gender. It’s a small but important link back to this year’s theme of ‘Accelerating Action’.

3 tips to improve DEI outcomes for deskless workers 

What can employers of deskless workers do to create a fairer, more equitable playing field? 

1. Lean into your people data 

It’s no surprise that metrics and analytics can be used to assess and eventually enhance DEI efforts. Fortunately, workforce management (WFM), payroll and HR technology solutions today can be a rich source of data. This makes it easier to provide insights that go beyond mandatory reporting. For example, overlaying WFM or HR data with payroll data creates a mix of financial insights (salaries, benefits, etc.) with ‘human’ information (teams, demographics, work patterns, etc.).  

Gender split benchmarking to monitor might include: 

• Take-up of parental leave 

• Teams that are male or female dominant 

• Job applicant profiles — is there a gender imbalance? 

• Salaries, pay raises and bonuses 

• Employees ready for promotion 

• Team performance 

• Where top talent sits – is there a shortage of female talent in senior roles? 

• Career development, promotion and demotion 

• Resignation triggers – are there warning signs about bullying, harassment or bias that need to be addressed? 

These insights can identify where inequalities or imbalances exist, so that strategic, data-driven decisions can be made. This is all essential if senior leaders and managers have DEI-focused key performance indicators (KPIs) to work towards. If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it!  

Humanforce provides a variety of solutions to help organisations extract, visualise, and analyse and report upon these relevant metrics. These solutions allow managers to view and segment workers based on work type or class, gender, age, business entity, ethnicity, ability, and more importantly — pay inequality, or gender pay gap metrics. 

People Analytics, for example, allows HR to extract data and generate intuitive, visually detailed insights about your employees and overall organisational structure. When data cross-filters are applied, employees can be sorted by business unit, pay grade, tenure, and more. To cite just two DEI-related examples, reports can be generated to show: 

• Gender / age: Demographic filters can provide useful insight into the composition of your workforce. What is the gender composition in your leadership teams? How many employees are nearing retirement? What positions do they hold? Is your business compliant with the relevant equality legislation for your region? 

• Pay inequality / gender pay gap: Automatically calculate the gender pay gap in percentage and dollar value across your organisation. You can also apply filters to identify pay inequality in different departments, work classes and seniority levels.

2. Consider how flexibility can work for your deskless employees 

The statistics show that frontline ‘care’ industries are largely dominated by women. For example: 

• In Australia, 97% of Childcare & Early Learning workers are female 

• 83% of the Australian Aged Care workforce is female  

• The Australian Healthcare workforce is predominantly female (74%), including Nurses & Midwives (88%) 

Globally, women account for 67% of the global health and social care workforce — and a woman’s duty of care doesn’t finish when work does, either. It was found that 74% of women felt stressed about balancing work and family commitments.  

Flexible work isn’t just about the location at which work is undertaken, though. It’s also about providing more autonomy and choice about the hours worked — and that’s something that can be offered to deskless workers. With more women than men balancing carer and work responsibilities, flexibility is critical to achieving positive DEI outcomes.  

Flexible work arrangements in all workplaces should aim to ensure that the needs of employees are balanced with the needs of the organisation. Leaders should aim to balance staffing requirements to ensure operations run as needed, without the risk and expense of over or under-staffing, while also ensuring employees get a blend of consistency and flexibility. That flexibility may take any of the following forms: 

• Flex-work time: Work schedules are staggered to create compressed working weeks or flexible working hours 

• Flex-time off: A manager may choose to extend leave days, extend time-off, or reduce daily work hours 

• Flex-work locations: Depending on organisational needs and size, deskless workers have the liberty of choosing where they’re comfortable working – e.g. a retail store closer to home 

• The ability for employees to bid on preferred shifts and swap shifts with colleagues 

All of these options are assisted by, and in some cases are only possible with the assistance of, technology. Humanforce’s Rostering & Scheduling solution allows frontline workers to manually update their own availabilities and shift preferences. Managers can view these preferences, check for conflicts, and accurately plan for peak periods while keeping employee flexibility in mind. In addition, the shift bidding feature register interest for vacant shift slots. After reviewing the location, department and times of the available shift, employees are able to bid for it directly, or managers can make direct shift offers to suitable workers without having to scramble to fill shifts.  

It’s also important to encourage your managers to discover the desired work patterns of their team members and what’s happening outside of their working lives (for example, if they have carer responsibilities). Understanding that employees have different needs that may require flexibility is an important first step in building a truly diverse workforce.

3. Review recruitment, promotion and pay processes 

It’s possible your recruitment and internal promotion processes are not helping your DEI efforts — and may in fact be hindering them. Here are some tips for fairer, unbiased hiring. Most of these can apply to internal talent moves as well.  

• Review recruitment channels: If your existing channels used to attract candidates are not delivering people with a diverse background, undertake a review of those channels. Are there new means of attracting under-represented demographic groups into your organisation? The scope of these channels will encompass recruitment agencies, social media, your own website, industry bodies, etc.   

• Create a diverse review process: Involve a range of diverse stakeholders in the initial screening process. It follows that the end result will be more informed and balanced selection outcomes. 

• Consider blind recruitment: Perhaps the ultimate way to mitigate bias in decision-making is to remove identifying features – such as the applicant’s age, gender, ethnicity or name – from an application prior to review. This brings the focus solely back to skills and aptitudes alone. Job ads and content on hiring web pages should also be reviewed to remove gender-coded words.  

• Use a structured interview process: A structured approach will use the exact same list of questions in each interview, in the same order. This allows each candidate to demonstrate their skills and aptitudes equally and puts everyone on an even playing field. An unstructured interview, on the other hand, with different questions asked and an inconsistent candidate experience, makes comparisons between candidates trickier.

It’s also important to consider the tech solutions on offer, like Humanforce’s Talent suite. It allows you to supercharge the hiring process by pooling a variety of candidates into a diverse talent community. Managers can then tap into a unified view of talent, skills, and details for each employee, and leverage it to make more informed DEI decisions.

As a final tip, when it comes to improving workplace gender equality, more leaders need to understand their gender pay gap, measure it and then set targets to take appropriate action to reduce it. Even if mandatory gender pay gap reporting is not required for your industry or your business, this might include: 

• Conducting an audit to understand the size of the gender pay gap 

• Reporting the findings to management and employees 

• Setting KPIs for leadership to reduce the gender pay gap 

• Taking action to increase the number of women in leadership positions 

• Encouraging men to access flexible work arrangements and leave entitlements

The time for positive action is now 

The above is far from a comprehensive list. From forming women’s support groups to offering coaching around unconscious bias, there are so many initiatives that can accelerate the journey towards gender parity. When we get DEI right, everybody wins.

About Humanforce 

Humanforce is the best-in-one platform for frontline and flexible workforces, offering a truly employee centred, intelligent and compliant human capital management (HCM) suite – without compromise. Founded in 2002, Humanforce has a 2300+ customer base and over half a million users worldwide. Today, we have offices across Australia, New Zealand, the US, and the UK. 

Our vision is to make work easier and life better by focusing on the needs and fulfilment of frontline workers, and the efficiency and optimisation of businesses. 

To learn more about how Humanforce’s solution can help automate people processes in your business, please contact us.