If there was one message that came through clearly at the 2026 WORK180 International Women’s Day Summit, it was this: we need to stop asking women, and others who do not neatly fit the old model of work, to navigate broken systems better, and start fixing the systems.
After the IWD cupcakes are gone, that is really the test. Not what was said on the day, but what employers go back and change.
I thought the panel discussion was one of the best I’ve seen, because it moved quickly past the why and into the how. The panel speakers focused on the parts of working life that shape outcomes long before anyone names them as a gender issue: access to opportunity, sponsorship, pay and promotion decisions, whether flexibility is treated as normal or career-limiting, and who gets seen as leadership material in the first place. Niels Reuvers from Sandvik reinforced that point in a separate presentation, showing what can happen when work is redesigned properly.
Representation is not the whole story
One of the main takeaways from the day was how often workplaces still treat equity as a women’s issue, or as something for HR and talent teams to solve, rather than a business responsibility.
That is also why representation alone is never the full story. It matters, but it does not tell you enough if gaps still persist higher up, in the highest-paid roles, or in who gets exposure to the work that leads to progression.
Dee Monaghan, General Manager, Culture and Sustainability at REA Group, made that point particularly well. REA Group has gender balance across the workforce, strong representation of women in leadership, and women accounted for 51% of recent promotions, but women are still underrepresented in the top pay quartile, which remains a key driver of the company’s pay gap. That is where the conversation gets more practical, because it stops being about optics and starts being about access.
Meritocracy has to be designed
The discussion around meritocracy was one of the sharpest parts of the day because it challenged a phrase that gets thrown around a lot. A genuine meritocracy does not appear because an organisation says it hires the best person. It has to be designed. If job design assumes a default worker with no caring responsibilities, if shortlists keep drawing from the same networks, if panels reward familiarity, and if pay decisions are made without equity checks, the outcome will reflect that. As Dee put it, when leaders see their own data, it becomes clear that “we just pick the best person” often means “we pick from a narrow, familiar pool”, and that broadening access actually gets you closer to true merit.
The examples shared on the day were practical. Jack Meehan, Senior Global Capability and Inclusion Manager at Dentons, shared one example where changing an Admin Assistant title to Legal Assistant increased the proportion of men in the role from 4% to 28% in a year.
Broadening a shortlist can change who gets considered, and changing who participates in an interview can shift what is valued in the room. Vicki Emmerson, who leads the Talent Acquisition function at Thales Australia, shared a practical response to the common claim that there are not enough women available to sit on interview panels. At Thales, every hiring manager goes through inclusive hiring training, trained Thales Ambassadors take part in interviews, and HR uses probing questions in talent and succession reviews to challenge assumptions and keep discussions anchored in evidence. They have also extended time-to-offer targets to give teams more time to build balanced shortlists.
These are the kinds of design decisions that either widen access or quietly narrow it, and they say far more about whether an organisation believes in merit than any slogan ever could.
Practical design beats good intentions
That was also why Jack’s examples on the pay gap resonated so strongly. Dentons reducing its median pay gap from 15% to 0% over three years captured exactly why those examples cut through. They make progress feel more replicable.
Niels Reuvers, Head of Parts & Service Logistics ANZ at Sandvik, showed what better design looks like in an operational environment. A relocation at its Perth Distribution Centre became an opportunity to redesign the work itself, reducing manual handling through automation, removing unnecessary licence requirements, and introducing staggered start times with shorter minimum shifts to create flexibility without reducing operational efficiency.
Niels shared that this translated into a much more diverse team, with:
- women increasing from 12% to 49%
- 15% of the team identifying as LGBTQIA+
- 12% identifying as neurodivergent
- 5% identifying as Indigenous
Some of the smaller ideas shared on the day stayed with me too. They pointed to the same truth: when employers change the design of the system, access widens. Having junior employees moderate leader panels shifts whose voice is heard and how leadership shows up. So does making leaders visibly own these conversations rather than leaving them at the edges of the business. Jack shared an example where shifting internal events so leaders made up 80% of speakers lifted attendance by nearly 300%!
People are very good at reading what an organisation really cares about based on where senior attention goes.
Accountability and flexibility are where intent gets tested
Accountability was the other strong thread running through the summit, and it feels especially relevant now with the new WGEA requirements coming into effect. From 2026, employers with 500 or more employees will need to choose three gender equality targets, including at least one numeric target, and then meet or demonstrate progress against them over a three-year cycle.
As Dee explained, that is a step change because it moves large employers from reporting to committing. For REA Group, it has become a catalyst to formalise an Australian Gender Plan focused on increasing women’s representation in the upper pay quartile, embedding equity gates into salary, hiring, promotion and bonus decisions, and formalising employee consultation on gender equality. It has also helped shift this work out of HR and into governance.
Chelsea Rossney, Chief Commercial Officer at Honeywell, also brought the conversation back to a broader point: when employers design systems with more people in mind, the benefits rarely stop with one group.
Flexibility came through in a similar way. Not as a perk, and not as something that should only matter to working mothers, but as one of the clearest tests of whether work has actually been designed around real life. That matters because flexibility means very little if it exists on paper but still carries a career penalty in practice. It also means very little if workplaces make progress while continuing to assume that care will default to women. Some of the strongest examples shared on the day reflected a broader view of support: flexible work that is available to everyone, paid parental leave designed without old assumptions about gender, and systems that recognise care, health and different life stages more realistically.
Balancing the scales at home
Even if workplaces fix their systems, some of this still has to shift at home too. If flexibility improves at work but the assumptions around who does the school pick-up, who carries the mental load, or who steps back first remain unchanged, the scales are still uneven. That is why balancing the scales is not only about workplace policy, but about how care is understood and shared more broadly.
We published a family checklist to help get that conversation started, because sometimes that is the hardest part.
Progress shows up in the mechanics
What I took from the summit was not that employers need better language or bigger statements of intent, but that the organisations making the strongest progress are getting much more specific about where friction exists, and then changing the parts of the system that create it. The job design, the shortlist, the pay decision, the shift pattern, the meeting structure, the leave language, the visibility of leadership, and the design of the process itself all matter because they shape who gets access, who gets on, and who stays.
That, to me, is the real point of balancing the scales. Not asking women, or anyone else who does not neatly fit the old model of an ideal worker to get better at navigating systems that were not designed with them in mind, but asking employers to take a harder look at what still needs redesigning and to do something useful with what they find.
Chelsea shared a line worth leaving sitting with: best practice means you are finished, but leading practice drives continuous improvement. It also reinforced another point that came through strongly on the day: if this work is still sitting in HR & TA alone, the problem has not been shared widely enough to be solved properly.
Next steps
We are taking these conversations nationally through a series of smaller roundtables focused on practical action, shared challenges, and what it really takes to redesign systems for better outcomes. If you would like to participate in one of these conversations, please reach out to me directly.
Whether you have already set your WGEA targets, are still working through them, or are not required to but want to take a more structured approach, we are here to help. You can learn more about how WORK180 supports employers here.
