New laws requiring employers to commit to achieve or make progress on gender equality targets could be passed when federal parliament returns for its first sitting week of the year.
But the government will have to work with the Greens and crossbench to pass the laws after the coalition labelled the proposal "government overreach".
Under the proposal, employers with 500 or more employees would be required to pick three targets which could include gender composition of the workforce, equal remuneration between women and men and consultation with employees on issues concerning gender equality in the workplace.
Employers would then have a three-year period to achieve or improve on those targets.
The failure to either set a target or make progress towards it could result in an employer being publicly named, and impact their eligibility for government procurement and ability to be considered for funding and grants.
A parliamentary committee has published its final report on the proposed laws, with five recommendations from committee members.
Economist Lenora Risse told the committee mandating gender equality targets would raise the salience of gender equality as an issue in the minds of employers and create a prompt for action and accountability.
"Requirements are a way to embed gender equality awareness and actions into an organisation's internal processes and structures," Dr Risse said.
"This contributes to gender equality policies and aspirations for progress becoming a normalised part of Australian workplaces, rather than an exceptional feature of only some organisations or a variable factor where effort and interest wavers with time."
The committee recommended the bill include full guidelines on what the Workplace Gender Equality Agency (WGEA) would accept as a "reasonable excuse" for non-compliance.
But in a dissenting report, the coalition argued the proposed laws would place "onerous financial implications on businesses that we rely on".
"This legislation will affect over 1650 of Australia’s largest companies by potentially precluding them from supplying goods or services to the Commonwealth government at or above $80,000 in critical areas including agriculture forestry and fishing, construction, education and training, manufacturing and mining," the dissenting report said.
"The provisions in this bill significantly undermine businesses and risk important procurement required for critical areas like national security."
The coalition's report also argued the laws provided "excessive ministerial powers" and were "government overreach".
"It gives the minister personal powers to set targets and rules of their own choosing with no scrutiny from businesses impacted," the coalition said.
"This creates the possibility of an even more onerous compliance burden on businesses, and even more unwarranted government reach into business operations."
