2021 WGEA Data Quality Report

The Workplace Gender Equality Agency (‘the Agency’) introduced a new reporting platform during the 2020-21 reporting period. As part of the system upgrade, data definitions, templates, and collection processes were significantly amended compared to previous eight reporting periods. The transition to the new reporting platform and the global COVID-19 pandemic restrictions had an impact on the capability of organisations to submit data to the Agency. The Agency accommodated these factors by extending the data collection period and the snapshot date for inclusion in the dataset.

Key Summary

• The 2020-21 WGEA Compliance Reporting Period commenced on 14 April and ended on 11 August. The questionnaire covers the preceding 12-month reporting period between 1 April 2020 to 31 March 2021
• The cut-off date for inclusion in the dataset was on 17 December 2021. The dataset covered 4,474 reporting organisations and 4,188,336 employees
• The coverage rate was 38.6% (down 1.7 percentage points from 2020) of the estimated overall Australian workforce[1]
• The timeliness rate was 84% (down 9 percentage points from 2020)
• In 2021, reporting organisations could report multiple industries in their workplace profile and allowed organisations in corporate groups to consolidate their reports into one. This reduced the number of reporting organisations by at least 125 compared to the 2020 reporting period and affected the coherence of metrics that use the number of reporting organisations as base.
• In addition to allowing reporting organisations to submit multiple industries, the Agency for the used the Australian Business Registry as the main source of industry information for the first time in 2021.
• Wholesale trade and other services were impacted the most by the change in the methodology for collecting industry information. There was a correlation observed between wholesale trade and reporting organisations that reported under manufacturing in 2020. There was also a substantial movement of health care and social assistance employees and reporting organisations to other services in 2021.
• The number of governing boards decreased by 11% compared to the 2020 reporting period. This was because subsidiaries no longer had to report a governing board that was reported by their parent organisation or if the board was located overseas. The number of male directors decreased by 16% while the number of female directors decreased by 5%
• The new manager categories, head of business and key management personnel/head of business, did not affect the overall number of managers reported to the agency. However, the new categories did impact the distribution of the headcount along the manager categories. CEOs decreased by 20% compared to the 2020 reporting period, KMPs 16%, and other executives & general managers by 20%. These were the biggest year on year changes since the Agency commenced reporting.
• There were accuracy issues detected with the head of business category and the new parental leave question pertaining to the distinction of primary and secondary carer’s leave. The Agency will strengthen the validation rules for these items in the 2022 reporting period
• The new workforce profile and workforce management statistics templates did not appear to affect overall coherence and accuracy of the headcount, remuneration, and movement statistics.
• In 2021, the Agency started collecting voluntary demographic information. Around 9% of organisations reported non-binary employees in their workplace profile (accounted for 0.6% of the total employees). Almost 80% of reporting organisations had provided year of birth and/or postcode data. By employee counts, around 70% of employees had a year of birth recorded against them and almost 60% of had a postcode information.