Practical guidelines for improving gender balance launched today
One of Australia’s most respected directors, Graham Bradley AM, urged companies to stop procrastinating and take ownership of gender balancing their businesses when he launched the Guidelines for Gender Balance Performance and Reporting in Sydney on the 1st May, 2013.
The Guidelines are the brainchild of Women on Boards, which formed a coalition early in 2012 to develop a practical and relevant framework to enable Australian entities to raise their performance and reporting of gender balance in their workforce.
Women On Boards (WOB) executive director, Claire Braund, told the launch that, “the guidelines are designed to achieve cultural change, rather than tick boxes on compliance with reporting obligations.”
At the core of the Guidelines is a Framework for data collection, analysis, reporting and performance improvement It provides a detailed outline of measures that entities can use to generate insights about gender balance. The 44 indicators focus on areas known to affect gender balance and each has been assigned a reporting trigger and an accountability – most often the CEO or the Board.
The Framework contains three levels or stages — Getting started, Getting there and Getting serious — to enable organisations to find their place on the diversity continuum and then benchmark their progress. This is to ensure that the Guidelines can be used equally by large companies and small businesses.
A key feature of the Guidelines is the sample dashboard or scorecard – literally a series of Excel spreadsheets into which an entity’s data can be entered to generate reports on gender balance for the board and senior leadership.
The Guidelines and sample Scorecard can be downloaded free of charge at the Women on Boards website: www.womenonboards.org.au/pubs/guidelines
