SA police plans gender balance within force next year

The South Australian Police announced on Monday that it will recruit an equal number of men and women in 2016 to ensure proper representation of the community it serves.

Police Commissioner Grant Stevens said that enabling gender balance within the police force will change the way SAPOL have recruited officers for a long time. Employment rate shows that females in the state’s police force constitute less than 30 percent of the total number of police officers who were sworn in for years.

South Australia will be the first state and the second jurisdiction that will undertake the 50-50 recruitment policy following the Northern Territory that announced to do so in October. Stevens also claimed that SA already has a considerable number of female employees, but it will try to better the numbers in the future.

“This gender balance will be more representative, given that the community is about 50.8 percent female and 49.2 percent male,” Stevens said in a statement. “The benefits of achieving a gender-balanced recruitment process are many and include fairness, opportunity and enhanced organisational performance. I am confident this quota can be achieved without dropping standards.”

The annual report 2014-15 published by the SA police indicated that the number of male employees was almost double the number of female employees in the force that consists of 6,012 officers. This year, the SA police force recruited 3,976 male compared to 2,036 female until June. The number of cadets recruited was 116 in 2015, out of which 80 were men.

Equal Opportunity Commissioner Anne Gale said that the SA police force was spreading a strong message of how to increase female representation across the community. “Setting a 50/50 recruitment quota will significantly increase the ‘pipeline’ of future female leaders,” she said.

Police Minister Tony Piccolo also expressed his pleasure on the initiative announced by the SAPOL. He said that they were celebrating 100 years of women representation in the police force this year and it would constitute an effective strategy to show the community how it should also ensure proper female representation across various spheres.

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