Accelerating action at the Women in Leadership Breakfast

by Sally Wong Apr. 15th, 2025

This year, the theme for International Women’s Day was #AccelerateAction. The core focus is on advancing gender equality by swiftly addressing barriers and biases faced by women.

At Engage Sydney 2025, the Women in Leadership panel—featuring Emily Wilson, Managing Director of FutureYou, and Amy Moar, National General Manager, Client Engagement, WorkPac—focused on this theme. Moderated by Bullhorn’s Megan Lynch, the conversation explored overcoming career barriers, the role of culture and leadership, and how recruitment can better support women into leadership.

Overcoming career barriers with resilience

Wilson started the panel discussion by sharing the story of how she got into recruitment in Australia. She joined a large national agency, describing it as “very male-dominated. A tough environment to be a female.” She continues, “I was one of the first women who went off on maternity leave, a three-week maternity leave policy.” However, when she returned, she wasn’t given the same position back.

Despite this setback, Wilson focused on her individual performance: “I just made sure that I role modeled being a working mom”. This resilience set her up for success and actually gave her the skillset to be able to set up her current agency, FutureYou. Wilson said, “I wanted to do things completely differently. To create an environment for our colleagues where we are comfortable to be ourselves, where we are diverse, and where we put the customer at the heart of everything that we do.”

Leading a strong inclusive culture

While Wilson’s story highlighted how resilience can lead to success, Moar’s journey in the recruitment industry showed the power of supportive leadership.

Moar recognised the inclusive, empowering leadership in her current role at WorkPac as well as past roles, especially at Hudson. She shared how she received her two most significant promotions while pregnant and even one while she was on maternity leave, as her then CEO acknowledged the output they would get from Moar on the ‘other side’ once she returned. “If you can support people through different family life stages—like managing young families—they will be loyal for life,” Moar said.

Closing the gender gap with actionable strategies

The recruitment industry is female-dominated at the consultant level; however, women remain underrepresented in executive leadership roles. “Only 37% of senior leaders in our industry are women,” Moar said. “It starts to wane as you get to the top; we need to keep working on that.”

Wilson noted that life choices like starting a family, relocating, or stepping out of the workforce for any reason can disrupt career progression unless businesses have a framework in place to manage it. “It’s a balance between being set up at home to be able to do your job as best you can and then having a supportive work environment that actually allows you to feel comfortable talking about and saying what you need to be successful.”

Businesses must proactively support women at all stages of life. “Make sure that you’ve got programs for women to keep coming through the top,” Moar said. She also urged agencies to “push forward on programs to make sure that you’re not just saying, ‘oh, we believe in work-life balance, ’ but you’re actually making it happen.” Wilson agreed, adding, “The more that you give people in terms of trust and the ability to just step up and do the job, the more they want to bring back to the business.”

Building transparency for the next generation

Both panelists urged agency leaders in attendance to build environments where gender equality and women in leadership are normalised.

Wilson encouraged the audience to be confident and advocate for themselves: “Be brave to ask the questions [about workplace policies, leadership, and culture]. She continued, “If you can’t ask those questions, it’s probably not the right place. There should be no question that’s off the table.”

Amy added that today’s younger generations are already pushing for more transparency and equity. “The unconscious bias or conscious bias that you have seen probably more for my generation will start to reduce over time—but we still have work to do.” She noted that we can do much better to progress on pay parity in Australia: “At the current trajectory, it will take five decades to equalise pay. We are responsible for making sure we move it forward because we shouldn’t be so far behind.”
Check out Engage keynote and session highlights for more insights from Engage Sydney 2025.