Factors Affecting Female Employee’s Career Choice in Mining Industry in Australia

Factors Affecting Female Employee’s Career Choice in Mining Industry in Australia
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Table of Contents
1.0. Introduction........................................................................................................................................... 3
2.0. Problem statement ............................................................................................................................... 3
3.0. Aim and objectives/research questions .............................................................................................. 5
4.0. Justification and potential output of the research ............................................................................ 5
5.0. Addressing the challenges.................................. ...................................................................... 11
6.0 References ...............................................................................................................................................
14
7.0 Appendix................................................................................................................................................ 17

Running head: RESEARCH IN BUSINESS 3
Factors Affecting Female Employee’s Career Choice in Mining Industry in Australia
1. Introduction
Gender discrimination in the job market is conversant because women are involved in jobs that
were initially believed to be of masculine beings. To give a brief description of the history of
where this issue about female employment came from, let us start by going down memory lane.
However, this is as shown from an account where during the colonial period, the men were
working in industries that were producing firearms for battle purposes as the world war was also
going on at the time. At this time, industries had already started coming up, and it was as well the
industrial age. The women were the stay at home people who would take care of the children and
do their usual house chores. The world war causes casualties and most soldiers to die. Due to the
fall in several soldiers, untrained men from the society also had to be picked for them to fight in
the war. They were given some bit of training but just a drop of water in the ocean. These men
fought very diligently and to the best of their ability up until the world war ended. After
caseation of the war, these men came back home only to find that the women who had been
staying at home were now working because food and shelter still had to be provided for the
family when they were at war. The women were working in the jobs that these men had earlier
been working before they went to war. Consequently, this is where the journey of women doing
jobs as equally as men started, all the way fast forward to the current world and age that we are
living in.
2. Problem Statement
Surprisingly, they are up to the task and perform as good as their male counterparts. The
Australian mining industry is no exception where recently, the number of women working in the

RESEARCH IN BUSINESS 4
mining industry has been on the rise. However, it has not been a walk in the park for these
women. Several issues have affected the productivity of these women in their place of work
ranging from discrimination against them by their counterparts to the various health issues that
are gender-specific. This paper seeks to delve into the factors affecting women in the job market,
using the Australian mining industry as the case study. The issues to be discussed below are the
ones affecting women in the aforementioned specific location. However, some of them may cut
across women working in the various job industries in the country and the globe as a whole.
In Australia, women account for almost 46% of the total number of employees. However, in
industries such as construction, utilities, and mining, they are very few women ranging from
10% to 15% of the total number of workers. There are various reasons why women in Australia
are discouraged from doing a well-paying job in industries dominated by men (Butler, 2006).
They can be attributed to the fact that there are not as many role models within the family
settings or the surrounding, conventional image about the nature of women’s work and cultures
in the workplace that discourage women’s’ career advancement. Some leaders in Australia and
the world at large have realized the underutilization of women skills in the job industry and have
taken steps to curb the problem. They have taken considerable steps to ensure that women are
highly effective in various industries by advocating for change in companies organizational
structures. Women incorporation does bring a view of specific issues from both sides of the coin.
It gives a bird’s view of the effects of individual decisions that a country takes. A country’s most
valuable asset is its people because it is the people who make and build a nation. Determinations
that a country makes are always supposed to be in the best interest of the citizens, and most
importantly, they should never favor one gender at the expense of the other gender. Thus women
participation helps in mitigating such issues that might arise from inequitable decision making.