Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .

Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 08 Hansard (Thursday, 5 August 2004) . . Page.. 3560 ..

unequal representation in a profession it is a flag for us to look at that area to see where the problem is and how we can address it.

When Mr Stefaniak was discussing his bill, he chose to concentrate his arguments on the underrepresentation of men in the teaching profession. Off the top of my head I can think of many more professions where women are underrepresented—the professions of engineers, medical specialists, barristers, senior management in corporations and big business, tradespeople, members of private sector boards, politicians, taxi drivers, tenured academics, judges, police officers and military personnel.

It is interesting that Mr Stefaniak has suddenly become a fan of gender quotas in a profession where it is the men who are underrepresented when over countless decades it has been the women who have been underrepresented. The question that actually needs to be addressed is: do we believe it is necessary to move away from merit-based appointment?

Mr Stefaniak’s bill reflects the belief that boys need more male teachers and that preferential recruitment of male teachers will achieve that goal. I acknowledge that Mr Stefaniak’s bill in its draft form is broader than just the teaching profession, but I am using it as it was an example that was put forth at the beginning of this debate. It was a debate about male teachers in our schools.

I believe that boys and girls in our schools need good teachers who can adapt to the different learning styles of individual students. I believe we need teachers who are well paid and have clear opportunities for career progression. I believe we need teachers who are respected in the community and whose work is valued by the government. As I see it, the real reason men are not attracted to teaching is that they see it as a low status and underpaid career. If we want better teachers, regardless of their gender, we need to value them both socially and financially.

There is a major problem with abolishing the merit principle, especially the merit principle for teachers: male teachers may become regarded as inferior teachers who have been employed for their gender and not for their teaching skills. We currently have some very good male teachers in the territory, and this proposal may lead people to regard them as second rate because we have adopted a policy that says less qualified men are employed before more qualified women. If we abolish the merit principle for teacher recruitment, we will end up with teachers being hired on the basis of their sex and not their skills. We need to be wary of doing that.

Mr Stefaniak has put forward the idea that we should allow employers to ignore the Discrimination Act where people of one sex dominate a profession. The current act does not go that far for any disadvantaged group. It simply says that women must have equal opportunity to secure a job, not an equal number of jobs in any profession.

When girls were getting poorer results than boys at school, despite most teachers being female, we did not think the answer was getting rid of the male teachers. Instead, we looked more broadly at what was discouraging women from continuing their education. I think we should be doing the same thing when we find boys doing more poorly than girls in our schools, and we should be doing the same thing in a profession where there is an obvious dominance of one gender over the other.

Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .