Advancing women’s rights at work
More than 50,000 IEU members are women, and women make up 75% of the education workforce, making bargaining, policy reform and advocacy to address structural barriers facing them a key focus of the union’s work.
Collective bargaining and education reforms
Unions continue to prioritise collective bargaining, with progress made on multi-employer bargaining in feminised industries. Improved pay and conditions in professions such as teaching are closely linked to feminised union growth and the future strength of the union movement.
The campaign for a single interest authorisation in Victorian Catholic schools is important not only for members in those schools, but also for signalling to all employers that basic rights – such as access to good faith bargaining orders from the Fair Work Commission – are not optional extras. They are fundamental to fair bargaining and to ensuring that women’s rights are not undermined by structural features of individual industries.
Narrowing the gender pay gap
Recent, modest but important reductions in the gender pay gap are attributed to union-won workplace rights and federal government workplace reforms. Education and training ranks fourth nationally in pay equity, but men continue to dominate managerial roles within a highly feminised sector, limiting further progress.
Reproductive health in the workplace
Unions are leading efforts to secure reproductive health leave through collective bargaining in schools, while also advocating for it as a universal workplace right. Although reproductive health conditions can affect all workers, women are disproportionately impacted, making this a key area of workplace reform.
Education reforms
Long-overdue pay rises for Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) workers have been a significant union achievement. It is now critical that the federal government extends the worker retention program beyond 2026 to secure permanent, sustainable wage increases in the ECEC sector and support high-quality early years education. Free TAFE is also making a difference, with 60% of enrolments in fee-free TAFE courses being women.
Religious discrimination exemptions
IEU members continue to call for reform of outdated religious discrimination exemptions that allow faith-based employers to discriminate against staff. There is no justification for differential treatment of workers based on marital or relationship status, pregnancy, or lawful medical and fertility choices.
Workplaces for Women – beyond the report
In 2025, Victorian Trades Hall Council collected the experiences of more than 600 workers in gender-segregated industries, informing the Workplaces for Women report.
The report finds that gender segregation remains entrenched in Australia, with more than half of private sector workers employed in industries that are either male- or female-dominated. It argues that this pattern reinforces unequal workplace structures, restricts women’s access to higher-paid and senior roles, and contributes to persistent discrimination and exclusion.
The report identifies ongoing structural and cultural barriers, including discrimination, stereotyping, inadequate facilities, and inconsistent responses to sexual harassment and safety concerns.
Building on the report, Victorian Trades Hall created the interactive online series Women’s Insights from Male-Dominated Industries, which examines the findings in greater depth with workers sharing their lived experience.
The IEU is using this important work to inform its work with and on behalf of members.
Click here to take part in the forums and read the full report
Long-overdue pay rises for Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) workers have been a significant union achievement.
Massive international conference addresses women’s advocacy
The Women Deliver Conference was held in Melbourne from 27–30 April, bringing 5,990 delegates from 189 countries speaking 246 languages to ‘counter misogyny and set strategy for change’. Speakers included former New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark, former Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard, and Amina Mohammed, Deputy Secretary-General of the United Nations.
Reporting on the Conference for Women’s Agenda, Rita Nasr wrote, ‘We are living through… the rise of an anti-rights movement actively dismantling decades of hard-won progress’.
Julia Gillard said, ‘We must push back, and must not let the next five or ten years solidify the retrenchment of women’s rights.’
Yet, Rita said the conference was characterised not by despair but by the refusal of it.
‘Acknowledging that is not defeat. It is the beginning of honest strategy.’
‘We need our collective strength more than ever. We know what is being done to us, and we are naming it. Funding for this work is contracting. The space for civil society is shrinking. And still, 6,000 people crossed oceans and borders to be here because getting together and convening is exactly what change requires right now.’
She said it was significant that the conference was being held ‘in the Blue Pacific region’, where women have ‘long adapted to climate crisis, held communities together and have been making change without budgets, titles, or recognition’.
‘They did not wait to be resourced before they led. They did not wait to be invited before they acted.’
Rita framed the conference as ‘a reckoning and a renewal. Change calls us here, and we will meet this moment’.