Girls Becoming Teachers: An Historical Analysis of Western Austra ...

This set a pattern for paying extremely competent women less than their male equivalents and only slightly more than average males. By 1877, this practice had been institutionalised by the Elementary Education Act of 1871 and by subsequent amendments, and mistresses were paid according to a separate salary scale, at a rate of 80 percent of the corresponding male rate. Equal pay—in a de jure, if not a de facto, sense—was not achieved until 1971. Systemic gender bias proceeded with the growth of bureaucratisation. The Elementary Education Act Regulations of 1895 retained the 80 percent ruling on salaries and added a ban on the employment of married women, which was not to be rescinded until the 1960s, during a period of acute teacher shortage.

In many ways, what was happening in Western Australia reflected what was happening in other nations as they developed systems of public schooling. Teaching in government schools became an increasingly feminised occupation, and the administration of schools and systems, a male domain. Nevertheless, in some ways, Western Australia is a special case. Unlike in America and Britain, women in Western Australia were enfranchised before the turn of the century; yet the continuation and consolidation of employment practices, which quite clearly denied equality of citizenship, is one of the puzzles of the workings of gender orders. Women teachers outnumbered men at all times in these large teaching bureaucracies, and Western Australia was no exception. However, there is little doubt that the department consistently worked to recruit and maintain a high proportion of males in classrooms.⁵⁶