You are required to share some information about your submission with your governing body, employees and employee organisations. A summary of these requirements is provided below.
Sharing your Executive Summary with your governing body
As soon as practicable after making your submission, you are required to share a copy of your Executive Summary with your governing body, or equivalent.
Your Executive Summary is a summary of reported data by each Gender Equality Indicator (GEI). It contains an employer's gender pay gap figures (median and average) for base salary and total remuneration that were calculated from the submitted data.
Your Executive Summary can be downloaded in the 'Data and Insights' tab of the Portal, under 'Reports'.
You will be required to confirm that you shared your Executive Summary with your governing body when you next report to WGEA.
Sharing your public reports with employees
As soon as reasonably practicable after making your submission, you are required to inform employees that it has been lodged and provide access to the public reports.
What reports should I share?
You are required to share all non-confidential data provided in each component of your report. This includes sharing the following documents, available in the 'Data and Insights' tab of the Portal:
- Questionnaire – public report
- Workforce Management Statistics – public report
- Workplace Profile – public report
How do I share them?
The reports could be shared with employees and shareholders through your normal means of communication, including newsletters, meetings and any other appropriate means. It must be transmitted widely to all employees.
You should ensure that employees and shareholders are clearly provided with the details of where they can access the reports, such as:
- a link to your website where a copy of the reports can be viewed or downloaded
- a file hosted on your internal intranet or
- an attachment sent via email.
Informing employee organisations
Within seven-days of lodgement, you are required to let employee organisations (with members in your workplace) know that the submission has been lodged.
This requirement does not mean an intensive effort is required by employers to identify all possible employee organisations. Rather, employers must notify employee organisations they could reasonably be expected to know about. This would include an employee organisation that was a party to an Enterprise Agreement or an employee organisation to which membership fees are paid by payroll deductions.
Informing employees and employee organisations of the opportunity to comment
When informing employees and employee organisations that a report has been lodged, you must advise them that comments on the report may be made to the relevant employer or to WGEA.
There is no time restriction on when comments on the report submission can be provided. However, comments provided to the relevant employer or WGEA during the 28 days after a report has been submitted will allow for those comments to be taken into account by the employer, in providing additional information, and by WGEA, in assessing compliance with the Workplace Gender Equality Act 2012.
Suggested wording
To assist employers, we have provided the following templates employers may use to share their reports. Please note this has been provided for guidance only and does not prevent an employer from using other wording.
In accordance with the requirements of the Workplace Gender Equality Act 2012 (Act), I am writing to inform you that, on [insert date], [insert name of employer] lodged its annual public report with the Workplace Gender Equality Agency (Agency).
For employees
[Insert how you are providing access to the public data, e.g.: “To access a copy of the public data reports, please click on the link attached to this email” or “A copy of this report is available on our intranet” or “A copy of this public data is attached to this email.”]
As employees of this organisation, you may make comments on the report to us by [insert how to comment to the employer] or to the Agency. Please refer to the Agency’s guidelines on this process on their website.
For employee organisations with members in the employer’s workplace
As an employee organisation with members in this workplace, the Act provides for your organisation to comment on the report either to us by [insert method for commenting to the employer] or to the Agency. Please refer to the Agency’s guidelines on this process on their website.