Discrimination ‘less blatant’

Press, 1 June 1985, Page 9

Discrimination ‘less blatant’

Sexual discrimination in the workplace is less blatant and perhaps less widespread now but it continues to flourish, according to the director of the Australian Equal Employment Opportunity Bureau, Dr Gail Radford. She is in Christchurch to take part in the End of Decade Women’s Conference this week-end. Dr Radford offered a cautious view of the decade’s effects on women’s employment. Ten years ago women were channelled on a large scale into certain types of jobs in Australia, she said. These were generally lowerpaid and lower-status jobs, and rules continued to exist which saw women sacked from their jobs when they married. “Anti-discrimination, human rights legislation has been implemented,” Dr Radford said. “We now have Equal Employment Oppor-. tunity or affirmative action, programmes.” The Australian bureau Dr Radford has headed since 1975 does not restrict its focus to women. It also caters for Aboriginals, disabled persons, and migrants with non-English backgrounds. The improvement in the employment of Aboriginals, for example, had been significant, Dr Radford said. Aboriginal women now made up 1 per cent of the

entire Australian Public Service — 80 per cent of which now held permanent officer careers. “When we first started, easily 90 to 95 per cent of Aboriginal women used to be in very low-level positions — sweeping floors,

doing clerical work, and so on,” she said. The legislative advances made must still be tempered with the realisation that enforcing legislation relied on individuals going to the bureau and complaining that they had

suffered discrimination. “We can tell the employer to remedy the specific complaint, but it does not necessarily mean that the company is going to go on employing women generally, recruiting them or training them for jobs at management level,” she said. “What the bureau is now running are affirmative action programmes for management to take the initiative, to look at itself, and to see if it is being fair or unfair to women in their employ.” This has already been well implemented in the Australian public sector. Dr Radford said that up to 160,000 public staff members were involved in such assessment. This would soon rise to 300,000. , The private sector was now being tapped.

Twenty-eight of the largest private companies in Australia were involved in a pilot affirmative action study. Top management had volunteered to research the situation of women in their employ, assess the level of discrimination, and take steps to recruit and train women for higher positions. Each company would prepare a report for a top-level Government working party to assess, and to recommend legislative safeguards from what the reports offer. The companies included in the pilot study included A.M.P. Society, A.N.Z. Banking Group, Southern Pacific Corporation, Ltd, and Wormaid International, Ltd. Dr Radford believed that such programmes could be easily translated into New Zealand terms, particularly in the private sector.