Workplace Gender Equality Agency Statement

February 2024

Australian Unity welcomes the publishing of gender pay gap information by the Workplace Gender Equality Agency as a catalyst for discussion and to facilitate change on this important matter.

At Australian Unity, we support and celebrate the diversity of our people and seek to foster a discrimination-free, equal-opportunity and respectful workplace. We aim to enable this by:

• Welcoming difference and sustaining an inclusive workplace for all our people and those we interact with daily.
• Supporting flexible working needs across our diverse workforce including family or carer responsibilities.
• Selecting candidates for the position or opportunity based on skills, ability and qualifications, irrespective of background or individual difference.
• Assessing and rewarding performance, and the potential of our people, based on individual capability and contributions.
• Reviewing annual performance and compensation outcomes to ensure they are free of gender bias.
• Annually conducting gender pay equity reviews to ensure employees are equally paid for like roles and pay group levels.

Current statistics and progress

At Australian Unity, we recognise that there are significant economic, social and wellbeing benefits to increasing women’s participation in the workforce at all levels.

We are proud that both our board and executive leadership teams have maintained a gender balance since 2018, with women currently representing more than half of our board, including the chair and deputy chair roles.

In addition, three of our four Australian Unity Group business platforms (Wealth & Capital Markets, Retail and Home Health) have female CEOs and women currently make up 37 per cent of our senior leadership roles—a steady increase over the past five years, an advance that continues.

With women representing more than 80 percent of our overall 8,000-strong workforce (88 percent of our home health and residential aged care workforce), we are implementing a proactive and dedicated strategy to attract and retain talent in these critical industries. The strategic priorities include workforce factors with a focus on providing permanent employment (88 percent permanency across our home care and residential aged care workforce), mentoring and management support, and industry-leading onboarding and ongoing training.

Australian Unity is also proud to continue Our Impact reporting, which seeks to capture and quantify our broader social impact (including through the employment of our people) in alignment with seven of the seventeen UN Sustainable Development Goals including Gender equality.

Commitment to inclusivity

While we are proud of the progress we have made to date, we know that there is more work still to do in developing our inclusive workplace culture.

The areas we are prioritising currently include:

• Identifying and nurturing female talent across the Group as part of our succession planning activities and, with this, strengthening our pipeline of female talent for senior and business critical roles.
• Supporting women in leadership development opportunities.
• Advocating for improved policy affecting care workers (88% female representation at Australian Unity) including implementation of sector-wide development, life-learning structures and improved skills based career pathways.