The next stage is to identify the issues for women in your workplace.

You will need to consider each of the Employment Matters in this process:

• The level of investigation will vary depending on the company's specific circumstances (for example, if your company is down-sizing you may spend more time analysing retrenchment rather than recruitment data).

Starting questions that may identify the issues are:

• What is working well for women here?
• What needs to be improved so that more women can fulfill their potential?

When analysing your issues the key things to consider are:

• What is, and is not, working well for women in this workplace?
• Why? What are the reasons for women doing well, or the reasons they are not doing as well as men?
• How can things be improved so more women can fulfill their potential?

Is there anything else that you need to change to recruit and retain valuable female staff? 

In addressing these seven Employment Matters, you may also wish to consider the extent to which informal practices have been formalised into written policies and communicated to all staff.

Consultation See the Act

Talking to a wide range of people will help you to identify the issues for women in your organisation, and also to identify ways of addressing these issues. The legislation requires you to consult with employees (or their nominated representatives) and, particularly, female employees.

However, it may be also useful to talk with:

• A cross-section of female employees who work in different roles, of different ages, with different experiences, and from diverse backgrounds.
• Any employee representatives/committees/steering groups.
• The senior manager with overall responsibility for the EEO workplace program.
• Managers who can tell you what the business issues are so that you can align any EEO issues with organisational issues (for example, downsizing may mean that recruitment action will be a low priority).
• A cross-section of men who work for your organisation to discuss any of the seven Employment Matters.

How do I identify the issues? See the Act

Use whatever method works in your organisation. For example, you may:

• Add some key questions to an employee survey.
• Design and distribute a one-off survey.
• Hold one-to-one interviews with people. 
• Hold focus group meetings of key groups.
• Arrange women's network meetings.
• Arrange diversity summits.
• Consider exit interview information.
• Investigate your people policies, and people management systems and practices.

Step 2 Outcome: 

Know what the Issues are for women. At the end of this step you should know what the issues are for women in your organisation, as well as the overall people priorities for your organisation. You will also need to assign responsibility for actioning these issues to a senior manager.

What to include in your report? See the Act

You will need to provide information on:

• How you analysed your workplace to identify the issues for women, and
• What the Equal Opportunity issues for women are in your organisation.

Tools to Assist at Step 2
Workplace Analysis Toolkit
Employment Matter Guidelines
Consultation Tools
Employee Opinion Survey
Training Needs Analysis and Skills Audit
Pay Equity Tool
Costing Turnover Calculator