The Epoch Times, by Jerry Zhu and Daniel Y. Teng: As of April 1, nearly 2,000 of Australia’s largest businesses must comply with the federal government’s gender equality laws.
Under the Workplace Gender Equality Amendment Act 2025, businesses with 500 or more employees must fulfil three gender equality targets from a prescribed list of 19.
They also need to demonstrate progress within three years.
They include targets like increasing the number of female managers, reducing the pay gap between men and women, increase uptake of employer funded parental leave, or introducing policies against sexual harassment.
“By introducing a target setting requirement, Australia is ensuring large employers are publicly accountable to take action and make demonstrable progress towards gender equality,” said the Workplace Gender Equality Agency’s CEO Mary Wooldridge, in a statement.
The Workplace Gender Equality Agency was introduced in 2012 under the former Gillard Labor government.
While the WGEA’s rules are not compulsory the consequences of failing to meet targets include public shaming via its gender pay gap report, and missing out on tendering for Commonwealth contracts.
The rules are not without their critics.
Former federal cabinet minister Kevin Andrews warned gender pay gap data did not reflect basic differences of working hours between employees.
“All the report really does is compare the median earnings paid to employees of different genders,” Andrews wrote in The Epoch Times.
“It does not examine the underlying reasons for the differences,” Andrews said, noting the lifestyle choices some women may take.
Prophetic Link:
“The pursuit of pleasure and amusement centers in the cities. Many parents who choose a city home for their children, thinking to give them greater advantages, meet with disappointment, and too late repent their terrible mistake. The cities of today are fast becoming like Sodom and Gomorrah. The many holidays encourage idleness. The exciting sports—theatergoing, horse racing, gambling, liquor-drinking, and reveling—stimulate every passion to intense activity. The youth are swept away by the popular current. Those who learn to love amusement for its own sake open the door to a flood of temptations. They give themselves up to social gaiety and thoughtless mirth, and their intercourse with pleasure lovers has an intoxicating effect upon the mind. They are led on from one form of dissipation to another, until they lose both the desire and the capacity for a life of usefulness. Their religious aspirations are chilled; their spiritual life is darkened. All the nobler faculties of the soul, all that link man with the spiritual world, are debased.” Christ’s Object Lessons, 54.3
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