Toolkit

The partners to the Preventing Violence Together Strategy recognise the important role that workplaces can have in the promotion of gender equality and the prevention of violence against women. We have developed this toolkit to guide partners along their gender equity and prevention of violence against women journey.

This Toolkit has been built on the significant body of work by Our Watch. WHISE and the partners to the regional Prevention of Violence against Women (Preventing Violence Together) wish to acknowledge the significant body of work, and legacy of Our Watch, in preventing violence against women and their children. Our partners have reflected on the Our Watch Workplace Equality and Respect (WER) Standards, the Victorian Gender Equality Act (2020) and have produced this Toolkit to translate the national WER standards and requirements for the public sector into regional opportunities for our partners.

The stages in our journey are cumulative and designed to be progressively completed from stages 1 to 4, logically building leadership commitment, staff capacity, empowering the workplace to assess their workplace conditions, and finally, exploring how to affect broader community change. These stages broadly reflect the WER standards as well as the benchmarking that our partners undertook in the July 2018.

Each workplace’s journey, however, may not be linear. A change in the leadership team or changes in funding streams may mean that a workplace previously at stage 3 finds that they must begin again at stage 1 with a new team. This toolkit allows for that by providing easy self-assessment tools at each stage. The toolkit intends to empower workplaces to identify the regional opportunities available to them, and the progression pathways to realise the capacity they have to become more gender equitable workplaces that can affect community change and prevent violence against women.

Our hope that this Toolkit provides clarity on what can be a complex, and long-term journey.