Christine Castley’s inaugural public lecture at University of Sydney’s Australian Centre for Gender Equality and Inclusion @ Work reframed the debate this week- the real productivity challenge is fundamentally about participation.
It’s not whether Australians have the capability to contribute more, but whether our workplaces are designed to enable them to do so.
Rather than asking how we can make people work harder, Castley’s address challenged us to think about: Who gets to participate? Who gets left out? Are workplaces designed to reflect the realities of modern working lives?
“The real challenge, in my view, is whether our institutions, including our workplaces, have kept pace with the Australia they now serve. Because the Australia at work today is not the Australia many of our workplaces were originally designed for,” she said.
For anyone immersed in workplace culture, this won’t come as a surprise.
From a working families perspective, for decades leading Parents At Work, I’ve watched organisations run on outdated assumptions: that employees can leave their care responsibilities at the door; that careers only progress along uninterrupted, linear paths; and that commitment to the job is measured by visibility, not outcomes.
Those assumptions no longer reflect the lived experience of Australian working families. Most parent households now rely on two incomes raising young children while millions of Australians are also caring for ageing parents, supporting family members with a disability or illness or navigating increasingly complex lives. Many workplaces still operate as though these demands sit outside the working day, and that disconnect carries a real economic cost.
Capability was already there
One of the most compelling moments in Castley’s address was her comparison with the Second World War. Women didn’t suddenly become capable when they entered the workforce in greater numbers during wartime. Their capability had always existed. What changed was society’s willingness to recognise it and build room for it.
The same principle applies today.
We have employees reducing hours because childcare isn’t available when they need it. We have experienced professionals declining promotions because leadership roles are incompatible with caring responsibilities. We have talented employees leaving because flexibility may exist on paper but not in practice. We have carers quietly stepping back from careers because workplaces were never designed with them in mind.
The capability is already there. The opportunity is to redesign work so it can be fully realised.
“We inherited workplaces built for a different Australia. Our opportunity is to build workplaces worthy of the Australia we have become.”
The business case for flexible work
Our National Working Families Survey of over 6,200 parents and carers shows the scale of what’s at stake. 74% of women and 57% of men report feeling stressed balancing work and family, up from 51% and 34% respectively in 2019. Half of all respondents believe an employee’s commitment is questioned if they use family-friendly arrangements, and 26% worry about their own reputation if they use the flexibility their employer already offers them.
Being certified family-inclusive improves this outcome. At certified workplaces, 92% of employers offer their people flexible work hours and location as standard, against 75% elsewhere. 65% of employees report being satisfied with their work-life balance, against 58%. 83% say they wouldn’t apply for a job that didn’t offer flexibility, a retention signal any CEO should recognise immediately.
Numbers show what’s happening. People show why it matters.
Emily Ritchie, a Corporate Affairs leader at certified family-inclusive employer Medibank, shared a parenting moment recently on LinkedIn that captures this better than any statistic. Her daughter called mid-afternoon, mid-meeting, to tell her about her school day. Emily let it ring out. Medibank CEO David Koczkar noticed and told her to answer it. She did, and her daughter launched straight into a full account of her day while the CEO waited. When she hung up, Koczkar told her, “I always want you to take that call.” Ritchie has stayed at Medibank for ten years, and she credits moments like this one for it.
That’s what leadership modelling looks like in practice, and it costs a business nothing beyond permission.
Care doesn’t only run parent to child either. When Jo joined QBE as a General Manager, she was juggling a new senior role alongside a house move with her family. As a new starter, she’d only accrued a limited leave balance and expected to take unpaid leave to manage it all.
Instead, she found QBE’s Life Leave policy already had her covered — four paid days, to use flexibly, with no service requirement to qualify. Jo used it for the move, and later for her children’s school swimming carnival and assembly, without having to log in remotely from the sidelines the way she had at previous employers. “QBE genuinely supports employees through life’s special moments, priorities, and stages, no matter what that looks like for each individual family,” she says.
These stories reflect a broader shift, away from treating care as an individual problem and toward recognising it as an unlocking, growing and retaining organisational capability.
This is Australia’s next productivity reform
While more is needed, Australia has made meaningful progress to address systemic barriers to participation such as the early education and care reforms, the expansion of Paid Parental Leave to 26 weeks and WGEA’s reporting reforms have increased pay transparency and accountability. More employers than ever are accountable to setting measurable gender equality targets.
But policy and compliance measures alone do not transform culture. Employers carry an equally important part to play: redesigning leadership expectations, training managers to lead flexible teams, normalising shared care for men, measuring outcomes instead of presenteeism, and supporting employees through major life transitions rather than expecting them to navigate them alone.
This work reaches beyond gender equality, toward Australia’s broader productive capacity.
Building workplaces worthy of modern Australia
One of Christine Castley’s closing reflections deserves to become a guiding principle for every organisation: “We inherited workplaces built for a different Australia. Our opportunity is to build workplaces worthy of the Australia we have become.”
That is both the challenge and the opportunity before us.
At Parents At Work, we see every day that employers want to do better but need support. Through evidence-based standards, benchmarking, certification and practical workplace capability, organisations are increasingly moving beyond policy to create cultures where people can thrive at work and at home.
Because this isn’t simply about supporting parents or carers. It’s about redesigning work to reflect the realities of modern life.
When workplaces recognise that work and care are not competing priorities, but interconnected parts of a productive society, everyone benefits. More people can participate fully in the workforce.
Organisations retain valuable talent, strengthen performance and build more resilient cultures. Families gain greater security and wellbeing. And Australia’s economy becomes stronger as a result.
The capability has always been there. The next frontier is ensuring our workplaces are designed to fully unlock it.