There have been a number of changes in work organisation and job design within the ATO over recent years which might be expected to remove some of the major blockages to promotion and career advancement for female staff. For the most part it is impossible to separate the question of what impact the new technology has from the question of how work is to be organised. The sheer rate and quantity of technological and organisational change was seen to be a serious disadvantage for women who tended to have interrupted working lives. Women who took any kind of leave at all were likely to have difficulties on their return, especially those who sought to return to work after five years leave to care for children. Such individuals 'would not stand a chance' given the rapid pace of workplace change.
Women tend to be concentrated in areas of work which are increasingly keyboard and screen focussed.
The problems created by new information technologies in these areas are gender issues because these are feminised areas of work. They are gender issues because of the strong division of labour by sex within the ATO, with women being heavily concentrated in the processing areas and largely absent from the technical areas and specialist areas such as audit. For women workers to benefit from the huge investment which is occurring in new technologies for office workplaces it is not enough to ensure adequate training and non-discriminatory appointments procedures. Recent feminist research has drawn attention not only to barriers inhibiting women's equal access to technologically based employment, but has also alerted us to the ways in which gender relations shape the design and implementation of the technology itself. The technology of word processing still owes an extraordinary amount to the typewriter because it was introduced in such a way as to maintain many of the characteristics of typing at which women were expected to excel.