Despite decades of work addressing diversity and lifting participation rates, Australia still has one of the most highly gender segregated workforces in the OECD, CEDA Chief Executive Melinda Cilento told the Australian Financial Review Workforce Summit in a panel on workforce participation.

“As women’s labour-force participation rate has increased, predominantly they’ve gone into sectors that largely are female-dominated, so the care sectors,” Ms Cilento said.

“We know that when you get those really segregated workforces it actually inhibits productivity. It can inhibit flexibility and it can inhibit mobility,” she said.

Given the current tight jobs market and the skills shortages businesses are facing, addressing gender segregation within industries remains a critical issue, Ms Cilento said.

“We want a more dynamic labour market, we want people to be able to work in the occupations that they’re best placed to work in, and we do need to continue to push diversity to actually break down some of the segregation that we’re seeing,” she said.

“For 50 per cent of the sectors that are heavily gender segregated, they’re the sectors that have skill shortages.”

The benefits of improved gender balance within industries go beyond addressing skills shortages, with Ms Cilento citing the construction industry as a prime example of the positive outcomes that come from increasing the number of women in heavily masculinised workforces.

“When you get greater gender diversity, you get better outcomes,” she said.  

“You get improved communication, you get better productivity, you get more flexibility, you get better safety and you get better wellbeing outcomes in terms of mental health.”

Ms Cilento also highlighted the importance of flexibility, paid parental leave, job design and addressing the cultural aspect of gender segregation.

“You can't have these trends existing for decades and not acknowledge that there is a cultural aspect at play here around what we see as women's work and what we see as men's work,” she said.

“This is still really prevalent and it's influencing the way our kids think about themselves and the things that they study at school.”

In addition to normalising flexibility at work for both genders, Ms Cilento also discussed the need to increase the uptake of paid parental leave by men.

“Paid parental leave is great, but it's men who are mainly the secondary carer and we've got to get more men taking that up,” she said.

Join CEDA’s Melinda Cilento in conversation with Betsey Stevenson, Professor of Public Policy, Professor of Economics at the University of Michigan as they explore Gender segregation in the workplace, women's labour market experiences and the economic forces shaping the modern family, comparing the US and Australia. Register now for this livestream on 7 March, 2023.