'Women in leadership consistently appears as a strategic priority'
Women have clearly become the dominant player in Australian human resource departments, with 84% identifying as practitioners and 65% as consultants.
This compares to 14.3% of men identifying as practitioners and 28% as consultants, according to the latest State of the Human Resource Profession report, produced by Deakin University, University of South Australia, Swinburne University of Technology and RMIT University.
That’s a big change from the past: In 1976, women made up less than 10 per cent of the workforce; by 1997 they were close to half; and in 2022 the profession was 82 per cent female.
“Historically, the function was largely viewed as an administrative function — hire people, get them paid, provide benefits, and manage forms and policies, amongst other duties,” Désirée Pascual, chief people offficer for Headspace App, said.
“Over the last decade and particularly since the onset of the pandemic, the recognition of the enormous value human resource adds to an organisation has become clear. Like any function, human resources benefit from a well-balanced team across demographics, including gender identification.”
Women bring an enormous set of skills to any job, including “incredible” time management skills, the ability to juggle multiple demands at once with a high degree of accuracy and resilience, “while simultaneously zooming out and thinking ahead holistically and strategically on multiple fronts,” she said.
“I will say that this is equally true for many men who have been allies in breaking gender stereotypes to create more fluidity and equitable division of labour in families and businesses.”
Balancing out the workforce
Gender equity targets are also contributing strongly to women accepting leadership positions with open arms after many decades of struggling to climb the corporate ladder.
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“Women in leadership consistently appears as a strategic priority in many diversity, equity and inclusion plans for a lot of organisations across Australia over the last 10 years,” Sam DeGuara, founder of Mind the Gap Consulting, said.
“Mandated gender targets across many stages of the employee lifecycle have been very successful to close the gap on traditional gender equity in the workplace. It is seen as a ‘quick win’ for people and culture teams to lead the way to meet — or in most case exceed targets — and set an example for the rest of the organisation.
“Potential cases of reverse direct discrimination exist here, and I’ve seen a few examples of this occur in my career when decisions are made to satisfy policy at the expense of ‘hiring the best candidate, skills and capabilities for the job’.”
HR teams growing steadily
The report also reveals that human resource teams are growing, with 50% of respondents stating that in the past five years their team has either grown ‘greatly’ or ‘moderately’.
No doubt the global pandemic has played a big role in the increase of human resource departments — combined with rising legislation focusing on equality in the workplace.
“Given the environment of continuous and compound change that we have found ourselves in throughout the last three years, we’ve seen a push for smarter, human-centred workforce strategies to manage the shift in mindset of workers not only in Australia but globally,” Pascual said.
“As we all navigated the pandemic, the old ‘command and control’ mindset was no longer an adequate way to manage teams through uncertainty.”
As a result, businesses have had to rewrite their playbooks, she said, “including how to work sustainably in a remote or hybrid environment, and how organisations can ensure continued engagement and productivity during times of massive change.”
The perception of the human resource function has shifted from tactical to strategic, which has enabled organizations to prevail through uncertain times, Pascual said.
“Additionally, the continued call for socially responsible and equitable business practices, has further elevated the need to include human resource leaders in strategic discussions at all levels to ensure informed, forward-looking perspectives are embedded in these discussions, many of which are directly anchored in sub functional human resource workstreams.”
The report also revealed that about 45% of respondent organisations had a centralised human resource function, responsible for organisational human resources.
An additional 29.3% of organisations had a central human resource unit with supplemented by specialist practitioners, located in the various business units. In another 20.6% of respondent organisations, business units had human resource business partners who were supported by a central human resource unit.