Step 3. Prioritise your Issues for Action See the Act

The next step is to identify the issues for women in your workplace. 
You need to identify the key issues for women in your organisation that you intend to focus on over the reporting year (and beyond if necessary) to help achieve Equal Opportunity for women in your workplace.

Through Step 2, you will have identified a range of issues, perhaps too many to address in one year, or issues that may take a number of years to fully resolve. In this step, you make a realistic assessment of what is most important to your organisation, and what can be achieved over the course of a year.

A number of the issues you have identified may also be the result of a single, or a handful of systemic key issues. If these are addressed, your other problems might resolve themselves.

At the end of this process you might end up with one or two key issues, or several smaller issues. It's up to you and your organisation to work out what your priorities are, based on a range of considerations such as the cost to the organisation and its employees if specific issues are not addressed.

For example, your priority issues might be any number of the following, or they might be quite specific to your organisation or industry. It's up to you to tell us.

Sample issues are: 

• Poor rate of return from maternity leave.
• Lack of women recruits.
• Significant occupational segregation.
• Poor representation of women in management.
• Women with children, or pregnant women leaving your organisation.
• Few women employed in permanent, regular, ongoing employment.
• Sex-based harassment in the workplace.
• Fewer training resources devoted to women relative to men.
• Lack of awareness among staff of Equal Opportunity policies.
• Little access to regular part-time or home based work.

Your priority issues can relate to any of the employment matters. They can also relate to broader issues for your organisation such as cultural change, leadership, occupational health and safety, workplace consultation, human resource management or employee relations as long as they are aimed at improving equal opportunity for women.

Step 3 Outcome: Identify the Priority issues 

At the end of this step, you will have identified your organisation's priority issues.

What to include in your report? See the Act

You need to tell us:

• the issues you identified as priorities, and 
• Why you chose the issues you did.