Perhaps the fact males are more likely to be f/t and females p/t so employers who sack males gain more flexibility within their labour force.

Given Employer’s irrational belief that older workers are harder to train, have lower productivity etc and the nil value they put on corporate knowledge and history I am not surprised by this.

Don - Thanks for the tip, I will check it out.

Russell - I don’t think the ABS surveys people in jails, so they won’t be caught (so to speak) in this data, but ‘attitude’ more generally could I think have something to do with it.

1. Females have a standing excuse that can explain away any absence (female reproductive health problems). No manager, male or female, is going to want to see proof of it.

2. As Russell said, males are more likely to turn up late after partying etc.

3. Males are more likely to tell the boss to fuck off when they get angry, whereas a female response would be to cry. Bosses don’t tend to sack people who burst into tears, but they do sack people who challenge their authority.

4. Males have different work ethics than females. If you give a male and a female a day to complete the same task that would take 6 hours on average, the male is more likely to complete the task as quickly as possible, and spend the remaining 4 hours of the day bludging. The female is more likely to stretch the task out into the 8 hours alloted.

However from the Boss’ point of view, if he comes after lunch to see the male playing Solitaire and the female still busily working, this makes the male look bad even though he has completed the same task in less time.

Sandra McKay and Uday Tate looked at how students believed a salesperson’s gender affected evaluations of their performance. They found that “students strongly believe that supervisors would be more willing to fire males than females for low performance.”

But there’s a flipside : “students thought that supervisors would more readily promote males over feales with identical performances.”

The paper has citations to some related research.

‘Student attitudes regarding gender bias in performance evaluations of salespeople’ Journal of Business and Psychology, Vol 16, No 2 Winter 2001.

Another possibility is that the phenomenon primarily reflects sacking rate differences by industry. Suppose that an industry such as vehicle component manufacture primarily employed men, and an industry such as primary school teaching primarily employed women. If the sacking rate in the former is higher than in the latter, it would be reflected in gender statistics but would not be primarily due to gender.