Australian Sex Discrimination Commissioner Elizabeth Broderick said here on Tuesday that urgent action was needed to reverse the decline of women in executive roles.
A government agency report released on Tuesday found the number of female executives employed by companies listed on the ASX200 has fallen by more than 2 percent over the past two years.
Broderick said in a statement to the press that the results raised "troubling" questions for women trying to climb the corporate ladder, and called for an investigation to determine whether sexual discrimination was taking place at the executive level.
"We need to find out if there is active discrimination taking place at the top of our most successful companies," Broderick said.
According to the report "the 2008 census on women in leadership", out of 1,700 executive positions, only 182 (7.4 percent) are women. There were only 33 companies in which women made up at least 25 percent of executive ranks after a fall of 2 percent.
That means Australia is lagging well behind other countries such as the United States, United Kingdom, Canada and South Africa. Only half of the companies listed on the ASX200 have at least one woman in an executive management position, compared to 85 percent in the United States.
Source:Xinhua
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