Australia Falling Behind In March To Equality

11 January 2009

SEX discrimination laws are failing Australian women and progress towards gender equality has stalled, Sex Discrimination Commissioner Elizabeth Broderick has warned.

The warning follows a Senate report urging Parliament to consider new laws sharpening the teeth of the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission by allowing it to launch its own investigations and court action.

That would represent a significant departure from the current 25-year-old Sex Discrimination Act, under which cases are examined only when specific complaints are lodged.

A report by the Senate's powerful Legal and Constitutional Committee released late last month said the reliance on complaints was a "fundamental limitation" in the act.

"The committee is persuaded ... there are deficiencies in the existing powers of the HREOC and the Sex Discrimination Commission to enforce the obligations created by the act," the report said.

The claim was mirrored by Ms Broderick, who said Australia had made good progress in tackling obvious cases of discrimination but the nation was failing to deal with systemic problems of pay inequity and employment opportunities for women.

"We have focused on the elimination of overt discrimination but we are finding it difficult to remove structural barriers to discrimination," she told The Sunday Age. "This comes back to deep cultural stereotypes and attitudes about women's roles. This idea that when you tell the boss you are pregnant and are marched out - we have this whole view about pregnancy in the workplace."

Ms Broderick said there was a strong view that gender equality was "something that we have already solved" when evidence suggested the country could be going backwards.

"People will say to me, wait a tick, we've got Julia Gillard, who is Deputy Prime Minister ... a head of state, Quentin Bryce, who is a woman, and a Deputy Leader of the Opposition (Julie Bishop), who is a woman. But the reality is there are still a tiny number of women in these sorts of positions."

A report by the federally funded Equal Opportunity for Women in the Workplace Agency said the number of women on boards and in executive management positions had fallen since 2006, with Australia now behind the United States, Britain, South Africa and New Zealand.

The research, based on a 2008 census of women in leadership roles, found that women held just 8.3 per cent of board director positions, compared with 8.7 per cent in 2006. The average for the developed world is 10.3 per cent.

A submission by HREOC to the Senate inquiry said women working full-time earned 16 per cent less than men. Research by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development has concluded that a quarter of the pay gap remains "unexplained", after considering the impact of factors such as education, experience, occupation and motivation.


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