Even the best workplaces can fail young women

Look at almost any Australian employer's LinkedIn page or careers website and you will likely find a commitment to gender equity front and centre. Policies are in place, programs are funded, and CEOs line up to declare their support.

The visual language of progress is everywhere. And yet, when Great Place To Work analysed survey responses from more than 180,000 employees across 500-plus organisations, a troubling truth emerged: the women being celebrated at the top of these organisations are having a radically different workplace experience from the women just starting out.

"Women at executive level rate their overall workplace experience at an average of 4.61 out of 5, including strong scores on wellbeing, recognition, confidence in leadership and fair advancement," said Rebecca Moulynox, general manager for Great Place To Work Australia and New Zealand.

"Junior women, mainly contributor and early-career employees, rate that experience at 4.07, back to pre-pandemic lows."

Only 47% of junior women say they look forward to coming to work, compared with 95% of female executives. On promotion fairness, junior women report average scores of 0.45 on a zero-to-one scale, versus above 0.95 for women at the top. On pay equity, contributor-level women sit between 0.32 and 0.76, while female executives sit between 0.93 and 0.99.

"It's not so much a gap," Moulynox said, "but a full-on chasm."

When flexibility works against the people it's meant to help

One of the most counterintuitive findings concerns flexible work, a policy lever that is almost universally framed as good for women. For senior women, it largely is. But for women in the early years of their careers, the picture is more complicated.

Moulynox pointed to what proximity has always meant for professional development. "Being in the room, seeing how decisions get made, having informal mentoring moments - all of these things are vital," she said. "When you move work online without redesigning how development happens, those moments disappear, and they disappear unevenly."

The data from financial and professional services - sectors with the highest rates of remote work - bears this out. Wellbeing scores for women peaked in 2021-22, when flexibility was negotiated individually, then declined as organisations shifted to standardised policies.

"It wasn't flexibility itself that drove the gains," Moulynox explained, "but the intentionality leaders were putting into connection at the time."

Onsite sectors tell a different story. In retail, healthcare and construction, where work is physical and team-based and recognition is embedded in daily rhythms, young women score 60% to 80% higher on recognition than the national benchmark, a finding that challenges some long-held assumptions about which industries are genuinely working for women.

The unfair impact of AI

If flexibility is a slow-moving complication, artificial intelligence is a faster one. Young women are concentrated in exactly the roles generative AI is set to reshape first: administrative, clerical, junior support, and content and communications work. These have long been the entry points into professional careers.

"If those entry-level roles disappear and we haven't built real pathways into higher-value work, we shrink the whole pipeline of future female leaders," Moulynox said.

The concern is that the data already shows those women are under-supported in the roles they hold today. Lower recognition, fewer development conversations, and less confidence in fair advancement are precisely the conditions least suited to helping anyone adapt to disruption.

Sponsorship versus mentorship

For organisations that want to do something about this, the research points to a specific shift in what senior women are being asked to do. Mentoring matters, but it is no longer sufficient on its own.

"For women already in positions of influence, it's no longer enough to mentor junior women — they need to sponsor and actively champion them," Moulynox said. "That means putting their names forward for high-stakes projects, ensuring they are in succession plans, and making it clear that early-career women are not just there to support the work but to grow into owning it."

Several organisations recognised on the 2026 Best Workplaces for Women list are already building this kind of infrastructure. Among the approaches worth noting:

• Mattel wraps parental leave transitions with structured coaching before, during and after leave, and communicates pay equity as an operational standard rather than an annual announcement.
• REA Group's Springboard to Tech programme fully funds a nine-month software development course for women and gender-diverse people while paying a salary.
• EML's internal academy allows women to gain qualifications while working, reducing the financial and time barriers that fall most heavily on junior women.
• Bizcap runs regular remuneration reviews and actively sponsors high-potential women into roles with strategic visibility.

"The 2026 Best Workplaces for Women list isn't a roll call of perfect organisations," she said. "It is a set of proof points that the pipeline problem is solvable when leaders treat women's experience as infrastructure to be built."

Framing women's experience as infrastructure rather than aspiration may be the most practical shift available to HR leaders right now.

This article was produced in partnership with Great Place To Work