Lessons from the 2025 Gender Equity Award Winning Organisations
The 2025 Gender Equity Awards shone a spotlight on organisations that are not just talking about gender equity, they are redesigning how work gets done.
From engineering to legal services, financial services and global consulting, this year’s organisational winners show that equity is not a side project, it is core business. Here is what they are doing differently, and what you can borrow for your own workplace.
The organisational winners at a glance
- Best Enterprise Organisation, 1500 plus employees, AECOM Australia
- Best Large Organisation, 500 to 1499 employees, Dentons Australia Ltd
- Best Medium Company, 100 to 499 employees, TelstraSuper
- Best SME Company, Coulter Legal
- Best First Nations Business, Ilan Style
- Best Intersectional Company, Capgemini Australia
AECOM, Engineering equity into the system
AECOM Australia shows what it looks like when equity is deliberately baked into every layer of a large enterprise.
Flexible work is available to all employees, with no gender based targets, and ninety five percent of people agreed in the last survey that they have the flexibility to manage work and life commitments. Additional leave includes twenty days paid family and domestic violence leave and the option for all employees to purchase up to six weeks of annual leave.
Externally, AECOM has been recognised through thirteen consecutive years as a WGEA Employer of Choice for Gender Equality, Work180 Endorsed Employer status and a 2025 Work180 workplace equity award for gender diversity strategy.
Internally, they have invested in an Advocate Sponsorship Program that has connected more than seventy high potential women with senior leaders, and mCircles peer led discussion groups that help women build confidence, visibility and connection. A clear equity, diversity and inclusion strategy with defined pillars, policy, purpose and targets underpins everything, supported by learning on unconscious bias, LGBTQI inclusion and First Nations knowledge.
The results are measurable. Median base and total remuneration gender pay gaps have reduced over three years, more than forty percent of the ANZ leadership team are women and senior female representation has grown by five percent over five years. Partnerships with Where Women Work, Champions of Change, CareerTrackers, Engineering Aid Australia and progress toward a Stretch Reconciliation Action Plan round out a picture of serious, sustained commitment.
Capgemini, Intersectional inclusion at scale
Capgemini Australia demonstrates what intersectional inclusion looks like inside a global organisation.
The company embeds employee led, intersectional inclusion across recruitment, leadership and community impact. Nine employee Communities operate in a hub and spoke model with an Intersectional Community at the centre, ensuring that lived experience drives strategy.
Initiatives include Women at Capgemini Month with events exploring surrogacy, neurodiverse women and intergenerational experiences, inclusive leadership training for all managers focused on bias and psychological safety, and equity frameworks for pay, performance and promotion.
The Relaunch program provides a three month re entry pathway, with more than twenty six participants and a ninety six percent retention rate. Targeted learning such as Confidently Going for Promotion and unconscious bias in hiring, along with gender affirmation leave, reinforce the message that everyone belongs.
Capgemini has redesigned recruitment, used gender neutral job ads, and built tailored pathways for trans, gender diverse, First Nations and neurodiverse candidates. Externally, they hold AWEI LGBTQ inclusion Platinum Employer status for four consecutive years and Employer of the Year awards, while internally gender representation has risen by nine percentage points overall and fifteen points in senior leadership.
Dentons, Treating equity as infrastructure
Dentons Australia treats equity as infrastructure, not an add-on.
Through its Gender360 strategy, launched in June 2022, Dentons has reduced the median gender pay gap from fifteen percent to zero by 2025, and more than sixty three percent of the workforce is now women. Women in equity partnership increased from twelve to thirty one percent, women in non-equity partnership rose to forty three percent in two years, and men in support roles have quadrupled.
Gender360 is a whole of firm strategy spanning recruitment, promotion, benefits, culture and data. Recruitment has been redesigned with gender neutral job titles, and leadership roles are actively marketed to underrepresented groups. Annual remuneration reviews are led by HR and Social Impact with quarterly reporting to the board, embedding transparency and urgency.
Benefits are co-designed with employees, including twenty-six weeks of parental leave for all carers, domestic violence recovery leave, wellbeing leave and volunteer leave. A flexibility strategy co-created with women and carers has delivered a significant improvement in work and life balance and a fifty percent emissions reduction since 2019, while headcount grew by thirty seven percent.
Inclusion has shifted from being network-led to centrally owned and expert-led, with mentoring and events that achieve high participation rates, including from white men as allies. Culture and safety have been strengthened, with the majority of staff reporting they do not see bullying or harassment, and the firm has launched Australia’s first gender diverse law clinic with community partners.
TelstraSuper, Closing the retirement gap
TelstraSuper is a powerful example of how to connect gender equity to long-term financial outcomes.
The company goes beyond compliance and treats equity as an everyday practice. Equal paid parental leave is available for all parents, regardless of gender or family structure, normalising care and disrupting traditional expectations.
Superannuation is paid for up to two years after return from parental leave at full-time equivalent salary, which directly tackles the retirement gap that usually affects women. Grandparents Leave recognises modern caregiving roles, and both the CEO and CFO have taken it and shared their experiences as role models.
There are ongoing gender pay equity reviews that look at like-for-like roles, promotions and progression, with targeted adjustments driving the gender pay gap down to ten point seven percent, well below the finance sector midpoint. A gender balanced executive team and board, and a diversity and inclusion strategy reviewed quarterly by executives and a cross-functional working group, keep equity on the agenda.
Strong support is provided for people experiencing domestic and family violence, alongside a leading gender affirmation policy that also provides leave for loved ones. Flexible work, part-time roles, job sharing and flexible hours are positioned as structural enablers of participation, not individual exceptions. Regular engagement and inclusion surveys, with visible action on feedback, and storytelling campaigns, reinforce a culture where ninety four percent of people agree TelstraSuper values inclusion.
Coulter Legal, People first in practice
Coulter Legal shows what is possible for an SME when people truly come first.
For nearly a decade, the firm has built a flexible, people first culture and is certified as a Family Friendly Workplace through Parents At Work. An eighteen week gender neutral paid parental leave policy with superannuation on paid and unpaid leave for twelve months is supported by additional paid IVF and fertility leave, pregnancy loss and stillbirth leave, grandparents leave, kinship and foster care leave and short-term care leave.
There is a clear commitment that parental leave does not restrict careers. Women are promoted while on leave, returning from leave and while pregnant. Comprehensive family violence leave goes beyond the legal minimum, and there are processes to address employees who perpetrate violence, taking a whole of community stance.
Flexible working is deeply embedded. Very few people work standard hours. Part-time roles, compressed weeks and working from home are normalised across all levels. Floating public holidays allow people to swap Victorian public holidays for religious or cultural days, including alternatives to Australia Day.
Workplace behaviours training and a Preventing Workplace Violence policy equip staff to manage disrespectful and aggressive client or third-party conduct. In 2025, all new director appointments were internal, including one person on parental leave and one non-lawyer, modelling diverse pathways to leadership. The workforce is eighty five percent women and fifteen percent men, with a fifty-fifty gender balance at the Director level and sixty percent women at the Leadership level, showing a strong pipeline of female talent.
Ilan Style, Recognising First Nations leadership
Ilan Style is a 100 percent Indigenous owned, women-led business that treats gender equality, cultural safety and community empowerment as its core purpose, not a compliance exercise. Led by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women, the company redesigns work around real lives with a four-day work week, remote options and culturally safe structures that honour family and community responsibilities while supporting career growth. Every product sold helps fund the Ilan Style Fellowship, investing in First Nations women creatives and language revitalisation, and profits are reinvested into projects led by women and elders. With transparent, bias-free pay and progression, mentoring pathways for Indigenous staff and storytelling that celebrates the strength of First Nations women, Ilan Style is modelling a powerful new standard for what ethical, gender equal and Indigenous-led business can be.
Five moves any organisation can make next
Looking across all the winners, five clear themes emerge.
- Design parental leave for shared care
Make leave gender neutral, remove primary or secondary labels, pay superannuation during leave and celebrate men who take extended leave. - Treat flexibility as standard, not special
Move beyond ad hoc arrangements. Use policy, technology and leadership modelling so flexibility becomes the norm across roles and levels. - Combine policy with sponsorship and community
Policies matter, however, careers move through relationships. Sponsorship programs, peer circles and employee communities accelerate change. - Measure pay, then close the gap
Regular, transparent pay equity reviews, targeted adjustments and board level reporting are non negotiable if you want to close the gap. - Anchor equity in leadership accountability
When executive teams, boards and managers are responsible for equity outcomes as part of their performance, things move quickly.
These organisations prove that gender equity is not just the right thing to do, it is a smart way to build a resilient, high performing business.
If you would like to dig deeper, download the finalists booklet or get in touch to explore how your organisation can get ready for the next round of the Gender Equity Awards.