When governments lead with intention, commit to good governance, and translate that commitment into law and policy, it can have pivotal consequences for society.
Ensuring good governance across the Victorian Public Sector is central to driving better services and outcomes for Victorians. Workplaces are vehicles for change, and this is exactly what the Victorian Government legislated for when it introduced the Gender Equality Act 2020, a law that requires public sector organisations to stop treating gender equality as an aspiration and start treating it as a legal obligation.
Part of the Act requires around 300 public sector organisations from libraries to universities to local councils, and everything from hospitals to water authorities in between, to report to the Commission for Gender Equality in the Public Sector on a set of workplace gender equality indicators.
Today’s release of a new report based on the Commission’s audit data from 2021, 2023 and 2025, gives us five years of data, the first of its kind in the Australian public sector, enough to see patterns, not just a snapshot. Released as State of gender equality in Victoria’s public sector 2026, the findings show substantial progress, but still a considerable way to go.
That matters, because the public sector isn’t a niche corner of the Victorian economy where change is easy to contain. It’s the state’s biggest employer, making up around 12% of Victoria’s entire labour force or about 500,000 employees. Change here doesn’t just improve conditions for public servants involved, it sets a benchmark for how workplaces across the state are expected to behave.
What this report represents is significant. This isn’t a survey of good intentions or a collection of case studies about “the business case” for gender equality. It’s around 500,000 employees’ worth of payroll data, board composition, sexual harassment reports and recruitment outcomes, tracked across the same organisations over years.
As Public Sector Gender Equality Commissioner Dr Niki Vincent, an independent regulator whose role sits outside government giving her the standing to hold the public sector to account puts it, gender equality is a matter of good governance, and meeting the Act’s obligations is the starting point, not the finish line. Real change, she argues, comes when equality is embedded in how organisations lead, manage and deliver services, with accountability starting at the top.
The good news from the Commission’s report is real. Women’s representation in senior leadership rose across the sector between 2021 and 2025, with four of eleven industries now reaching proportional representation in leadership, up from two in 2023. Governing bodies have remained gender balanced for the better part of a decade, a result that reflects sustained targets rather than luck. And in some of the most stubbornly male-dominated corners of the public sector, including police and emergency services and the trades, gender pay gaps narrowed and more women moved into roles that were once considered off-limits.
Dr Vincent frames this as evidence that “structural progress is beginning to take hold across parts of the Victorian public sector – including in some areas that have historically been most resistant to change.” That’s not a small thing. If gender segregation can start to shift in police and emergency services, it can shift almost anywhere.
The report doesn’t let anyone off the hook, and nor should it. The sector-wide gender pay gap hasn’t narrowed since 2021, even though most individual organisations improved theirs a contradiction the report explains through gendered segregation: women remain concentrated in lower-paid industries and occupations, men in higher-paid ones, so individual gains don’t move the sector-wide number. Sexual harassment rates have barely shifted for women and men and have climbed sharply for non-binary and gender-diverse employees, from 12.7 per cent in 2021 to 16.9 per cent in 2025. Men’s parental leave uptake, meanwhile, is going backwards at the sector level for every five weeks of parental leave women took last year, men took around one. As Dr Vincent puts it, progress is “neither consistent nor fast enough.”
That line matters because it resists the easy narrative of either the triumphant “look how far we’ve come” version, or the cynical “nothing ever changes” version. Both are wrong, and this data proves it. Change is demonstrably possible, and it is demonstrably too slow.
There’s a broader lesson here for anyone who doubts whether legislation like this does anything. The Commissioner’s foreword makes a point that deserves more attention than it will probably get, that the public sector is currently absorbing job cuts, budget pressure and rapid AI adoption, and “periods of rapid change like this carry a real risk: that existing gender inequalities become further entrenched as new systems and structures are built.” Organisations, she argues, have “the opportunity and the responsibility to design gender equality into those systems, processes, and policies now, to avoid trying to retrofit it later.” That’s not abstract. It’s a warning that the gains documented in this report are not self-sustaining, and that the next few years of restructuring will either lock in progress or quietly erode it.
What this report ultimately demonstrates is that mandatory, transparent, longitudinal reporting works not because it shames organisations into compliance, but because it makes the invisible visible. Five years ago, nobody could say with any authority how women in the Victorian public sector were faring on pay, leadership, harassment or care. Now we can, in granular, industry-by-industry detail. That alone is a form of accountability no voluntary framework has ever delivered.
Dr Vincent ends her foreword with the line “Together, we’ll move closer to a gender-equal Victoria.” The evidence suggests she’s right to say “closer” rather than “there.” For a government willing to lead with intention, that distance is the whole point of the next five years.
Feature image: Public Sector Gender Equality Commissioner, Dr Niki Vincent.