LAB³ Statement by Kerry Purcell, CEO, and Samantha Gellis, General Manager – People & Culture.

Dated 24 February 2025 

This is the LAB³ Gender Pay Gap statement for the WGEA reporting period 1 April 2023 to 1 March 2024.  

We would like more women to join our crew, and LAB³ is on a mission to make this a reality.

LAB³ champions gender equality and creating an inclusive and equitable culture. Innovation is core to our long-term business success, and we recognise that diversity is a strategic advantage that promotes innovation, better decision making, and a stronger workplace culture.  

LAB³ has always ensured equal pay for equal work, but the gender pay gap is different. It represents the difference in average earnings between women and men in the workforce. It is not to be confused with people being paid the same for the same job, or a comparable job – this is equal pay. LAB³’s average base salary gender pay gap is 20.5% for the reporting period 1 April 2023 to 31 March 2024. We welcome WGEA’s publishing of gender pay gaps.  

Today of our 200+ workforce, women hold 35 percent of our general and executive leadership positions, and 10 percent of our technical roles. Over the past year, four additional women have been appointed on merit to our executive and leadership teams (three promotions and one role advertised externally).  

Although we are not proud to have a gender pay gap, we are proud to be focused on improving things. Given the value we place on diversity, LAB³ is actively striving to increase the number of women in our workforce and the number of women in technical and senior positions. 

Our gender pay gap stems from a combination of LAB³’s youth as a company (we are addressing this effect) and the niche nature of our core business and in turn, the niche skills required of our talent (a harder nut to crack).  

LAB³ was founded as a tech startup in July 2017 by three ambitious IT leaders who wanted to disrupt the technology services market and compete against established global providers who have workforces in their thousands. The key to doing so was (and still is) to leverage automation and innovative technology. In 2025 LAB³ stands as an established force in the Australian market, where we provide cloud services to both government and private sector corporations. We are enormously proud to have achieved this with just a small team.

From the outset, LAB³ has been reliant on identifying and attracting highly skilled engineering professionals to make up most of our team. However, only 23% of our workforce are women. 

The primary challenge for LAB³ lies in the fact that when it comes to recruitment, the pool of potential talent for highly skilled tech positions is comprised of mostly men. Globally, the gender imbalance in tech has long been recognised, and the numbers are worse the more highly technical the technology practice (LAB³ focuses on cloud foundations, cybersecurity, and AI). 

Over the last four years, as an intentional part of our overall plan to mature our business to keep pace with our market growth, LAB³ has actioned initiatives to create a diverse and equitable workplace. These initiatives are leading to marked improvements in the gender balance resulting from our startup-hyper growth phase.   

Strategic initiatives to attract more women to LAB³ include remote and hybrid work models (which although attractive for everyone, are known to help women in particular), flexible work policies which include part time working options and strategic talent programs, focused on growth and development of our talent.  

Through our recruitment practices, we actively search for women candidates. However, we admit this is a difficult task for our recruitment team in roles requiring experience in the IT industry and/or technical skills.

LAB³ has been running a Graduate Program since 2022 and in every year, we have achieved gender balance in the emerging tech professionals who are offered a position in the program (which includes ongoing employment). While we are immensely proud of the contribution our Graduate program has to fostering STEM career opportunities for young women, we will not see the benefit of these efforts on our gender pay gap until our Graduate Alumni move into more senior technical roles, which will happen in time.  

LAB³ also adopts strategic Talent Management practices which include a formal Career Growth program to support every crew member achieve more from their employment at LAB³ including paid time off for learning (reducing after hours study).

The career plans and progression of development actions of our technical women are reported by managers to leadership every six months. This enables People & Culture, and our Leadership to provide appropriate support, and every opportunity for women to progress to more senior roles in our business.

LAB³’s primary strategy towards closing our gender pay gap is to increase the number of women in technical roles, particularly technical leadership roles. By increasing the number of women in highly specialised technical roles, we will see improvements in the gender pay gap across our workforce. LAB³’s Leadership team have KPIs measured on the progress and success of this strategy.

There is more for us all to do, and we are always working towards innovative initiatives to support gender diversity here at LAB³.

As we say at LAB³, together let’s fear less and achieve more,

Kerry Purcell, CEO, & Samantha Gellis, General Manager – People & Culture