Gender balance

At Wesfarmers, we believe equal access to employment, compensation and benefits, development and career opportunities for all team members align with our values. On every team, we strive for a minimum 40 per cent female and 40 per cent male, with the remaining 20 per cent being any gender or gender diverse. The Wesfarmers Board maintains a composition of not less than 30 per cent female.

The Wesfarmers Board (excluding Executive Director Rob Scott) maintains female representation above 30 per cent at 44 per cent women. The Wesfarmers Leadership Team is gender balanced with 50 per cent female and 50 per cent male, as is the total Wesfarmers workforce, comprising 57.2 per cent female,42.2 per cent male and the remaining 0.6 per cent of team members identifying as gender diverse or choosing not to disclose.

We understand that achieving and maintaining gender balanced teams requires constant vigilance including from our most senior leaders. There remain opportunities to strengthen female participation in senior executive positions.  Currently female team members hold 34 per cent of senior executive roles and at management and professional levels they hold 40 per cent of roles. The Corporate Office supports the divisions to build a gender-balanced workforce by regularly discussing progress, connecting the divisions with companies from other industries and providing access to expert thinking and research through memberships and forums.

The Group Managing Director meets with each divisional managing director twice a year to discuss succession plans and the pipelines into leadership roles, including how divisions are attracting, retaining and promoting current and future female leaders. In addition, the managing directors and human resource directors meet collectively to support talent identification, calibration and mobility across the Group. The Group continues to review the evolving requirements, capabilities and experience of future leaders, including by applying a diversity lens. In the most recent of these reviews (April/May 2023):

• Fifty-three women (42 per cent of all successors) were nominated as potential successors to divisional leadership team roles – an increase of three percentage points on 2022.
• Three women (30 per cent) were nominated as ready now or ready in one to two years as successors to divisional managing director roles and one woman (13 per cent) was nominated as a ready successor in three or more years. Identification, recruitment and development efforts will continue to focus on longer-term succession pipelines.

Within our divisions, talent reviews and people planning sessions are conducted every six months. Gender balance is considered during these discussions, as well as action to sustain or move towards balance.

Each Wesfarmers divisional managing director has gender balance objectives incorporated into their performance objectives and each division has its own gender balance and inclusion plan. Progress on gender balance is reported monthly via HR metrics reporting and more formally on an annual basis to the Group and Divisional Boards through diversity and inclusion reports.

Wesfarmers is a signatory to the United Nations Women’s Empowerment Principles. Wesfarmers’ support of the principles is consistent with its ongoing commitment to gender balance and aligned to the work currently underway across the Group.

Wesfarmers lodges an annual compliance report with the Workplace Gender Equality Agency (WGEA) and insights can be found on its website.

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