This is Part 3 of the suite of articles on the 2025 Workplace Gender Equality Agency data. Here we look at gender and workforce composition – and there is an enormous amount of data about those working in the practices that report to WGEA.
The WGEA data provides a great deal of information about workforce composition within Australia’s larger practices – and the Australian Institute of Architects. This is important. One of the factors that hampers research into the Australian architecture profession is the absence of information about how many practices there are and how big they are. Of course, the WGEA data only tells us about one part of the profession – the 29 larger practices and organisations that report. Nonetheless, it it very interesting and useful. These practices employ 5,745 people – a not-insignificant proportion of the profession, (It would be great to have this data for the entire profession, but there is no source for this.)
For an outline of the context and limitations of the 2025 WGEA data, please see the background and considerations sections of Part 1. See also Part 1 Pay gaps & equal remuneration, Part 2 Gender Equality at Work, Part 4 Flexible work & employee support and Part 5 Sex-based harassment & discrimination.
Overall workforce composition & the pay gap
Understanding the gender composition of these large practices is crucial – especially at the finer grain. A significant factor contributing to the gender pay gap is the disproportionate representation of men in higher-ranking positions and, conversely, the over-representation of women in lower-paid roles.
The 2025 data includes a lot more information than last year about the gender composition of reporting organisations. Interestingly, the total workforce employed by the reporting practices has a greater proportion of women than the architectural workforce as a whole, as documented in the 2021 Australian Census, although of course there is a three-year time lag between this data and that from WGEA. Analysis of the 2021 Census by Gill Matthewson identifies women as 35% of the architectural workforce (19,323 people); in 2021 women were 31% of registered architects and 46% of new admissions to the registers.
Ordering the reporting practices by the average total remuneration pay gap is also instructive, suggesting that size of practice has little to do with the size of the pay gap. (WGEA’s nationwide finding is that larger employers are more likely to have smaller gender pay gaps – but in this context large refers to companies with over 5,000 employees.)
Flipping the workforce composition data for all employees and overlaying / ordering it by the two total remuneration pay gaps – average and median – is a clear demonstration that overall approximate gender balance is not enough to tackle pay gaps.
Workforce composition by role
The WGEA data includes workforce composition data for many roles. The broad categories are all employees, manager, non-manager. Manager and non-manager are then split further into a range of roles. We have not tracked the data for all of these roles, many of which are not that relevant to architectural practice. We have, however, collated the data on ‘professionals’ within the larger non-manager category.
In news that will surprise no one, the approximate balance visible in the overall ‘all employees’ data disappears when we look at managers only. The charts below are sorted by the order of the ‘all employees’ chart above – hover over items to see the numbers as well as percentages.
Workforce composition by pay quartile
Disaggregating the workforce by pay quartile makes the uneven gender distribution more visible, revealing an almost exact mirroring between the lower and upper quartiles.
Similar patterns are revealed in most practices.
Workforce composition by employment status
The WGEA data on employment status reveals interesting patterns. The pie chart capturing the overall data shows the even gender split among the 5,745 employers represented. But it also reveals the low numbers of part-time workers and the gendered imbalance – 77% of women in the WGEA data work full-time and 90% of the men. In contrast, 19% of women work part-time and only 6.5% of men.
It is instructive to compare this to the Census data, which captures information about the full architectural workforce, while also noting the time lag – 2021 Census data as compared to WGEA data collected in 2024 and published in 2025.
WGEA defines part-time as “An employee engaged to work less than the minimum number of hours a week that the organisation defines as full time.” Census data, on the other hand is about hours worked. For comparison, Gill Matthewson has prepared two charts – one for people working under 30 hours and one for those working under 35 hours.
Full-time women are a much higher proportion of the total workforce in the larger practices reporting to WGEA than the overall Census proportion of full-time women. Part-time men are a very small proportion of the WGEA reporting workforce (3.1% as compared to 7.6% or 10.7% in the two Census calculations).
In the Census workforce, part-time men and women are similar numbers – and therefore similar proportions of the overall workforce. In the WGEA reporting practices, three times as many women work part-time as men.
The comparison between the Census and WGEA data is sobering, reinforcing the anecdotal evidence that working part-time is difficult in many larger practices. There is a lot of room for improvement. As we wrote in the Census Report, “Access to meaningful part-time work is an important factor in enabling people with caring responsibilities and other commitments to stay in the profession.”
It is important to note that part-time hours DO NOT impact the overall pay gap. The median pay gap is calculated using annualised full-time-equivalent figures. The prevalence of women in part-time roles DOES NOT impact a practice’s gender pay gap.
Gender and work patterns by practice
In most practices women are over-represented in the part-time workforce. The exception is Grimshaw – but this is where it is important to look at numbers as well as the percentage. The 33% / 66% spilt is the result of only one woman working part-time hours and two men. Hover over the charts to see the numbers.
Interact with the chart below to explore the number of women and men working full-time, part-time and in casual roles. Select the different series at the top of the chart to filter and check different comparisons.
Promotions, appointments, resignations
WGEA reports also include the gender composition of promotions, appointments and resignations.
Unfortunately they do not include information about redundancies, which would be a very helpful way to round out this information. We encourage practices to undertake this analysis themselves.
This summary chart demonstrates again that women are more than half of all workforce movements among the practices reporting to WGEA.
Although women may be particularly visible in the internal appointments, we are looking at smaller number here compared to the other categories.
It is important to look at the numbers as well as the percentages in these data sets. Often the numbers are very small – and in these scenarios just one individual can heavily impact the percentages. Hover over the charts to see the numbers.
The more detailed charts suggest that in many practices women are more than half the appointments and promotions – but they are also overrepresented in resignations from many practices.
See Part 1 Pay gaps & equal remuneration, Part 2 Gender Equality at Work, Part 4 Flexible work & employee support and Part 5 Sex-based harassment & discrimination.
