Author: Helen Marshall

Reporting the project

The complaints project generated a confidential report to the commission and five publications, all written by Sara. The original report on the purely quantitative data is published as 'Claiming Discrimination, Complaints of Sex and Gender Discrimination in Employment under the Victorian Equal Opportunity Act 1995' http://mams.rmit.edu.au/f384vgnv9wi2.pdf . The first round of qualitative analyses generated a book chapter, a conference paper and a journal article, all noted in the reference page. The re-analysis described earlier provided material for Sara's 2007 Clare Burton lecture. These lectures commemorate the leading researcher, bureaucrat and academic Dr Clare Burton, a pioneering Australian researcher, activist and practitioner in the field of gender equity. They focus on gender equity. Sara's lecture was entitled Understandings of sex discrimination in the workplace: Limits and possibilities. The data that she reported as part of her argument concerned the 'framings of what constitutes and does not constitute sex discrimination' revealed in the complaints project and in a study of pregnancy discrimination (Charlesworth and Macdonald 2007).

How much detail could be reported?

Communicating with a broad audience rather than a specialised academic group meant that it was not appropriate to give much of the reasoning that led to the conclusions, so none of the queries that had so excited us during analysis were mentioned in the lecture. Instead, the sections on understanding discrimination in the workplaces, contested and shared meanings in complaints and human dignity make use of stories and quotations.

In describing how the project was set up, I noted the need to de-identify data to protect privacy. Reflecting on the reporting process, Sara describes her use of the complaints data in the Clare Burton lecture as a 'balancing act'. She wanted the immediacy and vividness that telling the story of a complaint could bring to illustrating her arguments, so she included some verbatim quotations. She also gave complainants' names, rather than using the file numbers that are in the NVivo project. But to ensure that the identity of complainants was totally protected, she was very careful not to use any detailed information about the setting of the complaint. Thus a (fictitious example) female complainant working in retail in the automotive industry in a Melbourne suburb might become 'Helen, in retail'. Most of Sara's research is carried out in workplaces, and the legislative context described in setting up the project, along with the concerns of employers means that there are times when she cannot be as specific as she might wish about the type of organisation in the study. But this does not mean that she must suppress the qualitative data that often seem on the surface to enable identification much more readily than demographic attributes.

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