How corporate leaders can help rebuild respect in our society, through the scaffolding that prevents gendered violence
As at 30 August, Australian Femicide Watch records that 49 Australian women have been killed by violence this year.
It is only September.
And, over recent weeks, we have watched allegations of sexual violence involving men and boys, while five Sydney Swans players were suspended for breaching club standards amid a separate police investigation into an alleged sexual assault at their hotel.
Earlier this year, the Prime Minister rejected calls for a royal commission into violence against women, arguing that we already know what needs to be done. Perhaps we do. Yet while my social feeds are full of grief, anger and exasperation, it is difficult to identify a national response proportionate to what is happening.
The uncomfortable conclusion is that Australian culture has normalised gendered violence.
Now, normalisation does not mean approval. It means repetition has become familiar: deaths, assaults and misconduct arrive as individual stories. Outrage rises, promises are made, and then the conversation subsides until there is another surge in women being assaulted, harassed or killed. We continue to describe every incident as shocking while absorbing the pattern as ordinary.
A culture does not have to endorse gendered violence to normalise it. It need only repeatedly witness it without disrupting the conditions that allow it to continue.
Forty-nine women’s deaths cannot be dismissed as the actions of a few bad apples. Nor can the scale and persistence of sexual violence be understood as a succession of unrelated acts by individual men - or, in some cases, groups of men and boys.
Sexual violence is overwhelmingly perpetrated by men. That does not make all men perpetrators, but it does make male violence a patterned social problem. Individual accountability is essential, but it cannot be the full extent of our response.
This is not an invitation to regard men with suspicion. It is an invitation to all of us - and to the institutions that shape expectations of men - to participate in changing the conditions in which violence becomes more likely.
Our Watch gave us the image of the iceberg - an image we have long used at Grace Papers to help leaders see what they can influence beneath the surface.
Above the waterline is visible violence: murder, sexual assault, abuse, harassment, investigations and public scandals.
Below it sit the conditions that make violence against women more likely: the condoning of violence, men’s control of decision-making, rigid gender stereotypes, cultures of male dominance, everyday disrespect and the undermining of women’s authority.
In workplaces, those conditions also appear in gender pay gaps, biased promotion, gendered expectations, sexist language and the accumulated decisions that determine whose authority matters, whose contribution is valued and who is entitled to power.
The workplace is therefore one of the places where these conditions are either reinforced or disrupted.
Corporate leadership is not peripheral to preventing gendered violence. Corporate leaders shape the standards, symbols and systems that tell thousands of people what matters, what is expected and what will be challenged. When they speak out, model respect, empower women and enlist other leaders to do the same, their influence can extend far beyond the boundaries of their own organisations.
Scaffolding is the prevention architecture below the waterline: capable and inclusive leaders; systems that expose gendered patterns; controls that help prevent harassment and discrimination; trauma-informed responses to complaints and disclosures; education that challenges harmful attitudes; trusted ways for people to speak up; and interventions that empower women to exercise agency, protect their economic security and fulfil their potential.
Parental-leave transitions are one of the clearest examples where that scaffolding can be implemented
Pregnancy, parental leave and return to work are moments when harmful gendered stereotypes intensify. Women can find their commitment, capability and ambition reassessed as they become mothers, while men still encounter cultures - and managers -that treat care as secondary to their role as provider.
Rachel Potter’s 2024 research found that workplace discrimination during pregnancy, parental leave and return to work continues to affect mothers’ career outcomes, financial security, health and wellbeing. It also shows how workplace cultures and policies can reinforce expectations about who should provide care and whose career should take priority. Rachel Potter, 2024
For some women, the risk is more immediate. Pregnancy and the early postnatal period are times of heightened vulnerability to the onset or escalation of partner violence. The latest ABS data shows that, among women who experienced violence by a previous partner and were pregnant during that relationship, 42 per cent experienced violence during pregnancy - including 17 per cent for whom it began during pregnancy. Australian Institute of Health and Welfare
A well-managed parental-leave transition is therefore more than a benefit or retention initiative. It is prevention architecture: maintaining connection and economic security, equipping managers to recognise discrimination and risk, protecting agency, and creating trusted opportunities to disclose that something may not be right.
Yet parental-leave support, like many inclusion initiatives, is still often positioned as an employee benefit for the individual - and evaluated according to how many people choose to use it.
That assumes employees will recognise in advance what they are about to encounter: that a manager may reassess their ambition, flexibility may affect their opportunities, gendered expectations may reshape how care is divided at home, or pregnancy may coincide with the onset or escalation of violence. Often, people do not know what support they - or their manager - will need until a consequential decision has been made or harm has occurred.
Participation data can tell an organisation whether somebody opened a resource. It cannot reveal whether a manager interrupted a discriminatory assumption, a woman’s career momentum was protected, a man felt able to care without penalty, or an employee experiencing violence retained the connection and economic security that might help her become safe.
We don’t make workplace safety dependent on employees recognising a foreseeable hazard and voluntarily opting into protection. Nor would we judge a safety control solely by counting how often emergency equipment was used. Respect@Work and inclusion controls deserve the same seriousness.
The Sydney Swans provide an uncomfortable illustration of why scaffolding must be continuous.
The club’s Diversity Action Plan ran from October 2022 to October 2025. It included an Advancement of Women pillar, domestic-violence prevention and a systemic review of women’s experiences across football and commercial operations. Every pillar was underpinned by the club’s stated value of respect.
The plan concluded at the end of the 2025 season. The club says it is refreshing its pillars, but a replacement has not yet been published, despite its gender pay gap statement acknowledging there is more work to be done.
I am, of course, not attempting to draw a causal line between the plan’s expiry and the conduct under scrutiny.
But formal plans do more than document intentions. They are part of an organisation’s scaffolding - and its symbolism. They keep expectations visible, remind people what matters and signal the standards leaders are prepared to uphold. When a plan ends while the risks remain, those conversations, expectations and shared reminders can become less visible.
There is progress worth acknowledging: women made reports, those reports were taken seriously, and the club acted without waiting for the criminal investigation to conclude. The public conversation did not begin with the reflexive disbelief that has so often greeted women who disclose gendered violence.
But believing women is not the same as keeping them at the centre of the story.
It is also reasonable to examine the language used when those values are tested. Language such as “poor choices”, “breaches of standards”, players “finding themselves in a situation” and “disappointing conduct” may allow an organisation to act without prejudging a criminal investigation. But it can also transform serious or unlawful conduct into a story about male employees, workplace rules and institutional reputation.
So, we may have moved beyond language that openly discredited women. Corporate language - and institutional responses shaped by reputation management - can still make them disappear, and fundamentally impacts workplace safety, both physical and psychosocial.
What this sorry tale teaches us is that a value is not a control, and a commitment or target is not a system. But symbols still matter. They make standards visible, remind people what is important and signal what leaders are prepared to stand behind. Respect must be continuously communicated, taught, modelled, measured and upheld - including in the language an organisation chooses when its values are tested.
So, while yes, believing women after harm has occurred is progress, building and maintaining the scaffolding that helps prevent harm is the responsibility that follows.
Australia has spent a decade building that scaffolding. Rosie Batty brought family violence into boardrooms and workplaces. #MeToo became Australian data and evidence. Kate Jenkins’ Respect@Work Report reframed sexual harassment as a systemic safety risk shaped by power, culture and leadership. In 2022, prevention became a positive legal duty.
Yet awareness has travelled further than capability. AICD and ACSI research found that 85 per cent of surveyed ASX 300 directors considered preventing workplace sexual harassment a high priority. But only 32 per cent of women directors and 45 per cent of men strongly agreed that their organisation was well prepared to meet its positive-duty obligations.
For the past 20 months, we have heard from organisations that parts of this infrastructure have been narrowed, paused or - because they were treated as discretionary - removed. The US anti-DEI movement has created political cover for retreat, while tighter budgets and AI have placed pressure on initiatives whose preventative value was never adequately understood.
At the same time, University of Melbourne research found that 31.8 per cent of boys aged 13 to 17 believed attempts to give women equal opportunities had gone too far. Almost one in four believed feminism was damaging society and should be resisted with violence if necessary. More than 500 teachers described students using manosphere language to justify refusing instructions from female staff while complying with male colleagues. The behaviour was reported among children as young as six.
Those children will enter our organisations within a decade. Their parents are already our employees.
Respect at work cannot be viewed in a vacuum. Gender pay gaps, the narrowing pipeline of women into leadership and the undermining of women’s authority are not equivalent to violence, but they are influenced by many of the same beliefs about value, care, authority and power.
You cannot ask people to meet a standard you have never given them the time to consider.
We all benefit when workplaces set clear standards, symbols and messages about respect. Gender equality shapes what men and boys learn about identity, relationships, power and their place in the world. We cannot leave it to the tech bros of social media to define those things for them.
When political, corporate and community leaders retreat, they do not leave a neutral space. They leave a vacuum - and social media algorithms reward whoever is angry, provocative and loud enough to fill it.
Men and boys deserve better than that, too. They deserve leaders who offer something more compelling than grievance: leaders who model respect and care, set clear expectations, and equip men to challenge harmful conduct without leaving them to work out alone what respectful relationships and gender equality should look like.
Prevention will not always look dramatic.
Often, it will look like a manager preparing properly for a parental-leave conversation, questioning someone else’s assumption about a mother’s ambition, enabling a father to care without penalty, or maintaining a trusted connection with an employee during a period when the data tells us their safety may be at heightened risk.
This is where scaffolding holds: in ordinary workplace decisions made before their consequences become visible.
So this is an urgent call for every leader to build workplaces in which women are believed when they speak, empowered and valued when they contribute, and safe before they ever need to speak up - and in which men are freed from rigid expectations, supported to lead and care with respect, and equipped to help make respect and gender equality real.
Lead with grace,
Prue
Published 4 September 2026