Gender inequality within the managerial ranks of public and private sector organisations, and how it might be improved, is one of the knottier issues that confronts employers. Despite regular exhortations from senior political and business leaders to try harder – and the readily available advice of consultants and organisation like the federal Workplace Gender Equality Agency – progress has been slow to non-existent. Even in public sector workplaces where affirmative action strategies ought theoretically be straightforward propositions, senior female managers continue to be well outnumbered by their male colleagues, sometimes by as much as 5:1. So, news that the Australian Bureau of Statistics has boosted the number of women in its senior executive ranks from 21 per cent to 43 per cent in little more than a year amounts to glad tidings.
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The way it went about this was novel, at least for the Public Service: the names and gender identifiers of applicants for SES jobs were removed or withheld from the selection panels. The result was that many more women made it through to the final interview stage, at which point their chances of landing the advertised job more or less equalled that of their male competitors. Blind recruitment is not new, certainly, but hitherto it's been more likely to have been used as a means of enabling greater ethnic diversity in the workplace. With studies indicating that job-hunters with ethnic names have to send out half as many job applications again as their Anglo rivals before getting a call back for a preliminary interview, blind recruitment is an obvious mechanism for surmounting the unconscious bias that selection committees may manifest towards job seekers of unusual background, appearance or ethnicity.
That job applicants are held to different standards according to their sex is an unfortunate fact of life, though this hardly excuses it. That bias means women are treated as if they are less reliable than men, and not as fully committed to their jobs or careers in the way that men are reckoned to be. Confronted with the likelihood that a prospective employee will at some future point will seek to take maternity leave or work part-time to care for small children or aged parents, many employers will lean toward hiring the male applicant instead.
A desire, unconscious or otherwise, to avoid difficult or problematic employee arrangements is at the crux of such thinking. Long-standing cultural attitudes about the roles traditionally assigned women are another influence. Fortunately, such attitudes are becoming less entrenched, in part because there's reasonably strong evidence that organisations run by gender-diverse management teams tend to be more productive, more innovative, and more competitive.
The private sector appears to have assimilated this reality more readily than the public service, surprisingly. The public service, is however, on notice. In April, the Turnbull government announced a four-year strategy to overthrow a culture of gender bias and inequality. Those intent on achieving a 50:50 balance across all levels of the service sooner rather than later should consider emulating the ABS's recruitment strategy.
