These Awards are inclusive, and open to anyone who identifies as a woman, as well as non-binary people. While you don’t need to be an Australian citizen to enter these Awards, you do need to live in Australia.

Emerging leaders are those who can point to a breakthrough moment in their leadership or work that they’ve had during the judging period, which is indicated in each award description. Emerging leaders can be of any age and are eligible regardless of how long they have been in their current career, organisation or industry. Over the years, our ‘emerging leaders’ have ranged from those within the first five years of their career, to women who we recently appointed to CEO roles. Please note, the Agenda Setter award, and the Small Business Award is open to Emerging and Established leaders.

Yes! We have always kept entries to our awards free.

It is highly recommended that you attend the Leadership Dinner. We give all finalists one free ticket to attend the event, as well as a finalist discount to bring a partner and or to purchase more tickets.

Attending the Leadership Dinner and participating in this event is a great experience. We always aim to recognise all the finalists in the room, as opposed to only the winners. It’s a great opportunity to meet other finalists in your categories, as well as to meet the judges in person, and hear from more than a dozen women on stage. 

To support in getting a wide range of entries, we invite anyone (of any gender) to nominate women for these Awards. This nomination can be as simple as naming who they are and sharing a few sentences on why you’re nominating them.

However, for a nomination to be validated, we need the nominee to then “enter” the awards and/or agree to have the nomination already provided included in the process. To make this happen, we will need to contact the nominee, and so we will be relying on information provided by the person who made the nomination, and in some cases LinkedIn or other searches, in order to get in contact.

Unfortunately, we cannot guarantee that the person nominated will see or respond to our request to go through and compete the entry, but we will try our best.

No. This makes no difference at all. We really encourage women to just enter themselves direct, however we understand that sometimes it helps to have a nudge from others, which is why we make this option available.

Nominating someone can take a few minutes, or longer depending on how much information you wish to occur. Entering yourself could also be done in as little as 10 or so minutes. But in order to give as much information as possible, you may find the process takes up to an hour or so.

Finalists will be announced via the Women’s Agenda daily newsletter, on the 6^th September 2023. Winners will be announced at the leadership dinner on the 13th October 2023.

Yes! We want as many people there as possible. It’s an excellent event, and we keep it inspiring, engaging and as an opportunity to connect with others. You will get drinks on arrival, a two-course meal, and hear from more than a dozen women on stage, including our awesome leadership panel. Tickets to this event typically sell out, so please get in early. 

To be a finalist in the program, you need to agree to be available for the virtual judging session that will take place virtually between the 3rd and 5th of October. This judging session takes approximate 30 minutes, and is done via Zoom. Organising these judging sessions is a complex, logistical challenge, as we need to line up a panel of judges alongside those who are named finalists. We appreciate flexibility and our judges understand that kids, pets and others may be in the background.

Every year, we put together a diverse list of judges from a wide variety of backgrounds to participate in judging these sessions. Each judge will typically be asked to judge two to three different categories, and are asked to sign confidentiality agreements before seeing the finalist details. We do not provide a list in advance of which judges are judging which categories, as we do sometimes need to make adjustments in order to deal with conflicts and last-minute issues that arise.

Unfortunately, no. In order to keep our awards program free to participate in, we are unable to allocate resources for providing feedback on award entries.

For the purposes of our Small Business Award, we define this as a business of 100 staff members or less. This is a good opportunity for leaders across such businesses to get nominated and participate in this program. You don’t have to be the CEO or founder to be eligible for this award. If you have founded a business in the past couple of years — or significantly pivoted an existing business — you may wish to consider the Emerging Leader in Entrepreneurship Award. 

Yes! Finalists can enter again. If you have been a previous winner, please consider entering a different category and/or looking at the Agenda Setter award.

Yes. Please be direct and to the point regarding achievements, including any stats or figures you can point to in order to demonstrate results.

Ensure you are addressing work done from the judging period.

Your entry will not be judged on how well it’s written, but rather in terms of the content provided and the achievements you can point to during the judging period

Yes, your entry is confidential. However, if you are named a finalist, we will be requesting permission to publish a 75 to 100 word bio based on your work (that we check off with you first, for approval). We may also ask for further evidence to back up claims made in entries. Judges are asked to sign a confidentiality agreement before participating.

Yes! Over the years we’ve found how common it is for women to come together in launching a business, and we want to recognise this.

Please note: to keep it fair, only one co founder will participate in the virtual judging session. We can also only provide one free ticket to the event (but of course you’re welcome to purchase more).

Each year, we slightly tweak our categories to highlight our current editorial focus and areas we wish to spotlight.

Unfortunately, as an independent news organisation, we simply don’t have the resources and capacity to go beyond ten or so award categories each year.

It’s also important to us to keep the nominations and entries 100% FREE for this program while also to ensure that the awards event itself gives each winner the time and space to be recognised for there work – something that is simply not possible with too many award categories.

We love support! It makes everything that we do on Women’s Agenda happen, including the daily content that we put out every single day. We are proud to be a 100% female owned and run news publication, with a small team of journalists who write six to eight news stories a day, and aim to keep the issues that matter to women firmly on the national agenda.

We are also proud to be supporting and elevating so many women – not only in terms of these awards, but also with the profiles we regularly write on Women’s Agenda, as well as the work we do every day to share the wins and achievements that come up.

If you’d like to support us, you may want to explore options for sponsoring the awards, getting in touch regarding partner content and advertising, or simply by purchasing tickets to the awards.

Awesome, let us know at contact@womensagenda.com.au and we’ll do our best to answer within 24 hours.