Introduction

• To eliminate gender bias and sex discrimination we need to adopt and implement EO policies and processes, as well as explore what goes wrong once they are in place.
• Negative human factors can intervene when people interact at a personal level, making decisions that rely on cultural norms. Our policies, processes and intent to ensure equality of opportunity can be either compromised, or fully negated.
• To move forward we have to identify, unpack and neutralise the human factors that can have a negative impact on women at work. Be they covert, overt, subtle or blatant, understanding their potential impact, pre-empting and preventing them when making future workplace decisions is essential.
•  To create and maintain a workplace that is fair and equitable, everyone needs to be able to identify the human factors that can impact negatively on women.

Module Objectives

• Explores the ways human factors can compromise and negate our objective policies and merit based processes, impacting negatively on women at work;
• Identify immediate actions to defuse or counteract negative human factors;
• Identify long term strategies to pre-empt and prevent negative human factors;
• Determine what processes need to be introduced or enhanced in your workplace to pre-empt and prevent the negative impact of human factors.

Module Instructions

• Section A
  Read through the brief introduction to the sample workplace;
• Section B
  Work through:
  • Issue 1-retirement v redundancy,
  • Issue 2-flexible or fickle work practices? and
  • Issue 3-jobs at company discretion.

   Each Issue comprises:

  • A short case study, and a list of things that could go wrong in the sample workplace, and
  • A key question that allows you to unpack a negative human factor, examine its impact, review how to neutralise it and identify strategies to pre-empt and prevent it in the future;
• Section C
  Finish by identifying processes and policies for your workplace that could be introduced or tightened-up, to pre-empt and prevent the specific set of human factors listed, each of which has potential to impact negatively.
• Section D
  Definitions of key concepts are provided to assist you in addressing sex- based harassment in the workplace.