EQUALITY IN MANAGEMENT

Press, Volume CXV, Issue 33786, 7 March 1975, Page 5

EQUALITY IN MANAGEMENT

Equal opportunity for women In management could eventually be achieved, but first men and women must change their attitudes to many aspects of the roles of the two sexes, Miss Ria Mcßride told the Canterbury division of the New Zealand Institute of Management.

Miss Mcßride is a member of the Vocational Training Council, of the National Advisory Council on the Employment of Women and of the Parliamentary- Select Committee set up to investigate matters relating to the rights of women. She is also president of the New Zealand Federation of Business and Professional Women’s Clubs.

Women would pass through the gates of opportunity and up the steps of management as equals, she said, when they were treated as individuals; when there was no sex-typed division of labour; when there were no sextyped roles in society; when training and employment policies took account of individual aptitudes, capacities and interests irrespective of sex.

The problem created by the sex-role division of responsibility—women’s place in the home and man’s in management—was an artificial one, she added.

“In my opinion, it is presumptuous for employers to decide for women employees where their responsibilities lie in relation to their homes and families,” she said. “If a man is accepted for his individual worth at work, why not a woman? She is the one, with her husband and family, to decide whether she can successfully combine her role as wife and mother with advancement at work. She should be allowed that choice and must be if she is to be given equality of opportunity. “I can speak most feelingly from personal experience that there is nothing more humiliating than to have that opportunity door slammed shut merely because of the accident of one’s sex. There is. nothing that can more effectively and damagingly take away one’s self-esteem and confidence than to be told one cannot be promoted just because one is a woman,” she said.

Today, when women were marrying younger, having smaller families, living longer and having equal opportunity in education, there was no sense in wasting their education and their equal ability to participate in the economic and general life of society. Their equal involvement in all aspects of New Zealand life should be encouraged and promoted. “I say ‘promoted’ advisedly,” she added. “There is, in my opinion, such a thing as ‘discrimination in favour.’ This is what now needs to be done if women are to play a full part in our economic life and accept equal responsibility at policy-making levels.”

Women should be deliberately encouraged to prepare themselves by education and training, not only for their role as mother and wife, but much more extensively for their role as co-partners with men—in the economic life of the country and on policymaking bodies at local, national and international levels, she said. ‘‘At the same time, men must be encouraged, educated and trained to play a full part in the home, particularly’ in the child-rearing responsibility. Personally, I think men have opted out here with the excuse that they are the family’s breadwinner,” said Miss Mcßride.