Advancing Gender Equality in Australian Healthcare Leadership: Why National Targets Matter and What It Means for Healthcare Employers

Women comprise the majority of Australia's healthcare workforce yet remain underrepresented in leadership. This structural inequity has direct consequences for workforce sustainability and patient outcomes. Australia's new gender equality target-setting requirements, which create binding obligations for large employers, including major healthcare services, offer a timely mechanism to address this structural inequity. In this article, we explain why gender equality targets matter for healthcare, outline who must comply and what is required and describe how health services and training settings can embed targets within governance, clinical accountability and workforce systems. We introduce the Monash Learning Health System Maturity Matrix as a practical tool for aligning targets with organisational maturity and argue that, when implemented well, gender equality targets go beyond compliance, building the institutional resilience and culture that retains talent and delivers better care.