Commitment or Even Compliance? An Australian University's Approach to Equal Employment Opportunity

Women have always been under-represented in the professoriate, despite purported regulation of Australian universities under both state and federal sex discrimination and equal opportunity regulatory frameworks. Research from Australia and around the world has highlighted longstanding problems for the career trajectories of women in academia, such as ingrained sex segregation both within and across disciplines, and the masculine culture of universities evident in the undervaluing of teaching activities for the purposes of promotion, an area where women have historically dominated. This paper discusses the relationship between such issues and the policies designed to address them, in order to illustrate how and why these regulatory frameworks are not achieving their aims.