57 Per Cent of the VET Workforce, 22 Per Cent of the CEOs: The Leadership Gap the Sector Needs to Confront

Women are the clear majority of the people who deliver, assess and quality-assure Australian vocational education, yet the leadership structures that design, fund, govern and regulate that training are disproportionately shaped by men. An analysis of the numbers behind that gap, why the leadership pipeline is not self-correcting, what the 2025 Standards imply but do not require, and what it means for every RTO that exists to develop human capability and now has to decide whether it will apply that principle to its own workforce.

A Gap That Is No Longer Ambiguous

Here is a number the VET sector needs to sit with: 57.2 per cent of the VET workforce is female. That figure, from the Productivity Commission's 2026 Report on Government Services, describes the people who deliver training, assess competency, support students, manage compliance and keep registered training organisations functioning across the country. Women are not a minority in vocational education. They are the clear majority.

Here is another number: women hold around 22 per cent of CEO roles in Australia, a figure that has barely moved. It comes from the Workplace Gender Equality Agency's 2024-25 Gender Equality Scorecard, covering 8,239 employers and more than 5 million employees across 19 industries. Women hold about a third of board seats and around a fifth of board chair roles, and at every rung of the leadership ladder their representation declines as seniority increases.

Hold those two facts together. The VET sector is an industry where women constitute the clear majority of the workforce, yet the leadership structures that make decisions about how that education is designed, funded, governed and regulated are disproportionately shaped by men. The Jobs and Skills Australia VET Workforce Study goes further, identifying a 16 per cent gender pay gap within the VET workforce specifically, alongside a workforce that is ageing, highly casualised, and paid less than teachers in other education sectors. The table below sets out the core numbers.

The question is no longer whether a gender imbalance exists. It is whether the sector that exists to develop human capability is willing to apply that principle to its own workforce.

1. The Promotion Gap Is Not Self-Correcting

If the leadership pipeline were gradually self-correcting, the conversation would be about pace rather than direction. It is not self-correcting. HiBob's 2026 study of professional women in the Australian workplace found that momentum has stalled and, on promotions, reversed. The reward gap that was already present has, in the report's own framing, widened into a chasm, with men markedly more likely than women to be tapped for promotions and pay rises even as women's professional confidence reached new highs.

The consequences are visible in how women perceive their futures. Only 54 per cent of women now believe their employer is making a genuine effort to develop female leaders, down from around two-thirds a year earlier. And only 69 per cent of women see a clear path to leadership in their current organisation, down from 72 per cent the year before. That decline represents thousands of experienced, capable women drawing rational conclusions from what they observe around them.

LinkedIn's Economic Graph analysis, published in its State of Women in Leadership report for 2026, reinforces the picture. Women accounted for around 44 per cent of all workers globally but held only about 31 per cent of leadership roles, even in industries predominantly staffed by women, including healthcare, education and retail. In Australia, women made up about 45.7 per cent of the workforce on LinkedIn's data but occupied roughly 33.8 per cent of top leadership positions, an increase of only 0.4 percentage points since 2022. The pipeline fractures most visibly at the first step: women's representation drops from around 48 per cent at the experienced individual-contributor level to roughly 40 per cent at entry-level management. That first move into management is where the largest single cohort of women leaves the leadership pipeline, and representation falls further still toward the C-suite. The trend is also moving the wrong way: across comparable economies, women's share of new senior leadership appointments peaked in 2022 and has declined for three consecutive years since.

2. The Pay Gap at the Top Is Growing, Not Shrinking

The WGEA Scorecard provides a dimension the VET sector cannot afford to overlook. The average total remuneration gender pay gap across Australian workplaces is 21.1 per cent. For every dollar a man earns, a woman earns about 79 cents, which adds up to a difference of $28,356 over a year.

At the CEO level, the gap is far larger and moving the wrong way. On WGEA's figures, women CEOs earn tens of thousands of dollars less than male CEOs in base salary alone, and once superannuation, bonuses, overtime and additional payments are included, the difference rises to around $185,335 a year. The CEO gender pay gap stands at 26.2 per cent and increased by 1.2 percentage points in the past twelve months. This is not a gap that is gradually closing. It is widening at the most senior level of Australian organisations.

Within VET specifically, the JSA VET Workforce Study identified a 16 per cent gender pay gap. VET teachers are already paid less than teachers in other education sectors, and female VET teachers earn less again. This means the women who form 57.2 per cent of the VET workforce are working in a sector that pays less than comparable education roles and then paying them less again within it. The compounding effect of these two gaps should concern every governing person in VET.

3. Women Study, Women Train Others, and Women Still Do Not Lead

The Australian Government's Status of Women Report Card 2026 records that women accounted for 62 per cent of Fee-Free TAFE enrolments from January 2023 to September 2025, and 46 per cent of all VET enrolments over a comparable period. Women's workforce participation reached a record yearly average of around 63 per cent in 2025, and Australia recorded its highest-ever global ranking for gender equality. These are positive markers. But they sit alongside the structural reality the leadership data exposes.

Higher education does not guarantee women a clearer pathway to leadership. LinkedIn's analysis indicates that even women with the highest qualifications experience some of the steepest declines when moving into leadership, which challenges one of vocational education's foundational assumptions: that credentials create opportunity. The data suggests that for women, credentials alone are insufficient. Something else is operating in the space between competence and advancement. Women leaders responding to the data described it as the quieter mechanics of sponsorship and familiarity: younger, more junior, less experienced men being given access to high-profile work that naturally led to promotion, not through conscious bias but through comfort and proximity to decision-makers.

4. The Generational Pattern and Why It Matters for VET

LinkedIn's analysis reveals a generational dimension that is particularly relevant to VET. The leadership gap is widest for older generations and narrowest for the youngest, with career breaks for caregiving, slower promotion trajectories and fewer women applying for senior roles identified as the primary factors affecting all but the youngest cohort.

This matters because the VET workforce is older than the Australian average. The JSA study found that almost half of VET workers are aged over 50 (46.5 per cent in the most recent Census data), compared with around 30 per cent in the broader workforce. The sector therefore has a disproportionately high concentration of workers in the generation where the leadership gap is widest. The women who carry the deepest industry knowledge and the longest training experience are, on this evidence, the women least likely to be represented in leadership. WGEA's data adds that most Australian employees work in an organisation dominated by one gender. In VET, that dominance is female at the operational level, but the leadership question remains: does that majority translate into proportional representation in governance, strategy and organisational direction? On the available evidence, it does not.

5. What the 2025 Standards Imply but Do Not Require

The 2025 Standards for RTOs do not contain a gender-equity standard. There is no compliance obligation to report on leadership composition by gender, to demonstrate equitable promotion practices, or to ensure governance structures reflect workforce demographics. But several Outcome Standards create expectations that intersect directly with the leadership imbalance.

WGEA's research with the Bankwest Curtin Economics Centre, echoed by the World Economic Forum's use of the same leadership data, shows that greater gender balance in leadership is associated with better organisational performance. For RTOs navigating the demands of the 2025 Standards, the quality of decision-making at governance level is a material factor. Homogeneous leadership produces homogeneous thinking, and the framework's emphasis on self-assurance, risk management and continuous improvement calls for exactly the diversity of perspective that gender-balanced leadership provides.

6. What VET Providers Should Do

Addressing the leadership imbalance does not require waiting for regulatory mandates. It requires providers to examine their own practices with the same rigour they apply to student outcomes and training-product compliance.

Conclusion: The Sector That Teaches Capability Should Demonstrate It

The VET sector's purpose is to develop the skills and capabilities that let Australians participate fully in work and community life. It trains nurses, educators, aged care workers, builders, business administrators and community services professionals, and a clear majority of Fee-Free TAFE enrolments are women pursuing exactly these pathways. The people who teach and assess those students are, in the majority, women. They deliver the training, manage the quality systems and support students through complex circumstances, and they do it in a sector where only around 22 per cent of CEOs are women, where the gap at the top is widening rather than closing, and where the VET-specific pay gap stacks on top of a sector that already pays less than comparable education roles.

A 0.4 percentage point increase in women's leadership representation over four years is not progress at any meaningful pace. A CEO gender pay gap that grew by 1.2 percentage points in a single year is not a matter of time. These are structural outcomes of structural choices. Every RTO that has a continuous improvement plan, a governance framework and a stated commitment to fairness already has the mechanisms to address this. What is required is the honesty to look at the data, the discipline to collect internally the data that does not yet exist, and the will to act on what it shows. The sector that exists to develop human capability cannot credibly do so while tolerating a leadership imbalance within its own organisations that the evidence shows is widening, not narrowing.

References and Further Reading

Productivity Commission. Report on Government Services 2026, Chapter 5: Vocational Education and Training (February 2026). https://www.pc.gov.au/ongoing/report-on-government-services

Jobs and Skills Australia. VET Workforce Study (2024). https://www.jobsandskills.gov.au/studies/vet-workforce-study

Workplace Gender Equality Agency. Australia's Gender Equality Scorecard 2024-25 (November 2025). https://www.wgea.gov.au

LinkedIn Economic Graph. The State of Women in Leadership: Global Employment Trends in 2026 (March 2026). https://economicgraph.linkedin.com

HiBob. Australia Women Professionals in the Workplace 2026 (March 2026). https://www.hibob.com/research

Australian Government. Status of Women Report Card 2026. https://www.pmc.gov.au/office-women

World Economic Forum. Why gender-balanced leadership matters in uncertain times (January 2026), drawing on LinkedIn Economic Graph data. https://www.weforum.org

National Vocational Education and Training Regulator (Outcome Standards for Registered Training Organisations) Instrument 2025, Quality Areas 3 and 4. Federal Register of Legislation.