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 and pre-empting and preventing them is essential when organising work.
• To create and maintain a workplace that is fair and comfortable everyone needs to be able to identify the human factors that can impact negatively on women.

Module Objectives

• Explore 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
  • Issue (1) Family Friendly at a Price;
  • Issue (2) Pressure to increase hours; and
  • Issue (3) The manager is paid to make decisions.
• Section C
  finish by identifying processes and policies for your workplace that could be introduced or enhanced to pre-empt and prevent the specific set of human factors which have potential for negative impact.
• Section D
  Useful Definitions