The Australian Rail Track Corporation has welcomed a strong response to its latest equality push, with more than 100 women turning up to an information session for its ‘women only’ employment drive.
The national rail network owner was recently granted an exemption from the NSW Anti-Discrimination Board, allowing it to advertise a number of maintenance positions in its Hunter Valley business unit exclusively to female applicants.
The manoeuvre is part of the ARTC’s drive to increase the number of women in its workforce to 30%. Its workforce currently comprises just 18% women, and in its Hunter Valley business unit, that figure is just 12%.
An information session, held on Sunday in Muswellbrook, showed a strong response to the move.
“We were really pleased with the turnout and the calibre of the women that attended the information session to find out more about ARTC and the roles,” ARTC executive general manager of the Hunter Valley Jonathan Vandervoort said.
The ARTC says more than 400 applications have been received for the roles in only the first week of the recruitment campaign.
“To put this into perspective, early last year we had a recruitment campaign for infrastructure maintainers and while the wording of the advertisements clearly encouraged women to apply for the roles, we only had three female applicants,” Vandervoort said.
“This is a great turnaround and reinforces the approach we are taking with this campaign.”
Unless it is justifiable for the role in question, hiring people based on their race, religion, age, gender, sexual preference, nationality, etc., is disallowed by the Anti-Discrimination Act NSW (1977). But under Section 126 of that act, a company can attain a defined exemption from that regulation for a valid purpose.
In this case the ARTC was granted an exemption to advertise roles only to women, as part of a push to increase its female workforce.
Vandervoort says the move has been a positive one so far.
“Given the quality, interest and number of enquiries, the challenge for us is now to go through the great applications we have had and select the successful applicants,” he said.
“We really have been fortunate with the level of quality of responses received and the number of women interested in building a career with ARTC.
“We are also encouraging women to get their application in as soon as possible as we may need to close off the application process earlier than expected given the high level of interest.”
The ARTC’s anti-discrimination exemption will apply until July 6, 2017.