These industries are keen to recruit a specific gender. Could this benefit you?

Women may make up almost half the workforce but there are still plenty of industries in which one gender dominates.

Given that women constitute 45.6 per cent of Australia's overall workforce, it would be easy to assume we are less than 5 per cent off a balanced labour market. Not so: plenty of industries still struggle to strike a gender balance.

According to Associate Professor Anne Junor, deputy director of the industrial-relations research centre at UNSW, women are not shattering as many glass ceilings as they might like.

"By and large, women have not been moving into male areas but have been occupying new jobs in areas of growth, particularly in services," she says.

While some industries, such as utilities and aviation, employ slightly more women than they did 25 years ago, other areas are excessively dominated by females.

"Accommodation and restaurants, finance, education, health and community services have become feminised, with education, health and community services now strongly female occupations," Junor says.

So who is where? Using Australian Bureau of Statistics data, we take a look at five industries and the realities for those working in them.

CONSTRUCTION
Seeking: Women
Women constitute about 15 per cent of workers in the construction industry but the gender imbalance has not stopped Coco Goodison. As a project manager for Contexx, she is in charge of a $33 million building in West Melbourne.
If being a minority gender bothered her, Goodison doesn't think she would have entered and stayed in the industry.
She says good working conditions and pay compensate for the long hours and she encourages more women to consider the sector.
"I honestly do not know what is deterring them," she says. "There are plenty of diverse opportunities within the construction sector."

EDUCATION/CHILDCARE
Seeking: Men
The feminisation of education and the childcare industry continues (from 63 per cent in 1986 to 69 per cent in 2006), supporting Junor's observation that fields with more flexible work arrangements or part-time opportunities attract more women.
Childcare worker Alisia Cameron says she cannot help but notice the skewing of gender in her field.
"I worked at three different centres doing my prac for university and I have never come across a male early-childhood worker," she says.
"They are needed and desperately wanted. So many children could use a stable, positive male role model."

AUTOMOTIVE
Seeking: Women
The owner of family mechanical and auto electrical workshop MobiMech, Jaclyn Bold, is very comfortable in her male-dominated industry.
"Clients love it that I am a female owner," she says. "Customers - especially male customers - often comment that they feel it's OK to come into my workshop and say they do not know anything about their car and not feel like the 'bloke' is going to laugh at them and rip them off."
Bold says that despite TAFE and the automotive industry actively targeting female apprentices, things have been slow to change.
"There are still some male bosses who are discriminating against female mechanical apprentices by making lewd comments, excluding them from certain jobs, or making them solely responsible for the workshop cleaning," she says.

COMMUNITY SERVICES
Seeking: Men
This already feminised field (63 per cent in 1986) now has about 85 per cent women. It's also notoriously low paid (a fact that some experts say deters men more than women).
A court case is currently considering issues of equal remuneration for the 200,000 Australians in this field, regardless of their gender.
At present, government agency workers earn more than those in NGOs - and everyone earns less than they should.
"If you are co-ordinating a service or running a shelter, the most you might earn is about $70,000 to $80,000," says the deputy chief executive of the Australian Council of Social Service, Tessa Boyd-Caine.
"Those types of jobs require high-level management skills but you'd be earning vastly more in the private sector if you were managing a similar organisation," she says.

FINANCE
Seeking: More women at the top
With women making up about 56 per cent of finance industry staff, there is no shortage in the field - it's just a matter of where they end up.
"While there are currently not enough women at the top, I was surprised by a recent poll conducted by the Financial Services Institute of Australasia that showed only 28 per cent of men felt there was a gender divide within financial services, compared with 85 per cent of women," says commerce/law student Jessye Lin of Capital W, a women's business club at the UNSW Australian school of business.
Lin has been pleased to see groups such as Male Champions of Change working to alter the status quo. "It is great to see the recent push from the men at the top, where male senior executives have come together to target the issue of female representation."