As a loving father, Simon Styles enjoys doing the usual dad activities with his nine-year-old son Jordan, such as fishing and riding bikes.

He takes his role as a father seriously and enjoys caring for his son. But in June last year his responsibilities as a father were put under threat when his boss was reluctant to let him leave to pick his sick son up from school.

Forty-five-year-old Styles was working as a music teacher at a Perth high school when the incident occurred. When he asked for permission to leave his boss said, “Can’t his mother sort it out? Can’t his grandmother do something?”

“My boss sent me on a guilt trip, saying, ‘you’ve got students booked in for lessons, I’m going to have parents on the phone complaining,’” says Styles.

“I argued that just because I’m a teacher doesn’t mean I’m not a parent as well…you would expect a parent to come and pick up a sick child from school, so you would expect this of me too.”

He eventually got permission to leave for the day, but Styles believes he was treated unfairly after the unpleasant confrontation.

“Life was made, let’s just say, a little uncomfortable for me after that – there were many references to that particular incident."

“In the end I left.”

Unless a man is sacked, Australia's Sex Discrimination Act provides no protection, nor any means for complaint.

The findings of a Senate inquiry into the efficacy of the Sex Discrimination Act, currently underway, will be released in November.

Sex Discrimination Commissioner Elizabeth Broderick has recommended to the inquiry that both men and women be provided equal protection under the Act.

“If they’re put on the daddy track, they’ve got no recourse," Broderick says.

"By daddy track I mean they are discriminated against in terms of promotions and their ability to get on in the company because of their caring responsibilities."

But even if Styles had been sacked he wouldn’t have lodged a complaint, he says.

“In those types of jobs you don’t feel like you have any permanency, you only have temporary contracts for 12 months at a time. Being in a relatively small town, in music terms, the word would get around pretty quickly that you caused trouble. So I just moved on,” he says.

Unlike Styles, Dylan Hunter* was eligible to make a complaint. In 2002, a month before Christmas, the 39-year-old father from Adelaide was fired from his job as a structural engineer.

He hadn't committed a horrendous act like stealing money or harassing a co-worker - he was dismissed because he couldn’t work the Saturdays he had already committed to caring for his three-year-old son.

Hunter was devastated.

“It was four weeks before Christmas and New Year, and I had no income, I was on the dole,” he says.

Hunter got another (better) job a couple of months later and therefore would have been unable to prove hardship had he registered a complaint. His new job in the government sector offers a much more flexible arrangement.

“Sometimes I bring my son in to my office so he can see what I’m doing, like when schools have a pupil free day or a day off. He likes it, he’ll play Lego or do his exercises,” Hunter says.

Styles says he too found a better job with a more flexible employer.

“The boss I have now has five children himself, his wife is a teacher also, and he well and truly understands what it’s like to have a family," Styles says.

"He understands my situation, which I explained to him upfront. I was very, very honest and clear with him and said I’d had some problems in the past and I may have parental issues that need to be dealt with…they can’t wait till the end of school time. He understood that.

Sitting in her 17th-floor corner office in Sydney, Broderick is adamant that attitudes towards employees and their caring duties must change and that, for this to happen, any legislative amendments would need to be met with a significant education campaign.

“The whole culture that exists in our workplaces is that you’re not a serious player if you have any visible caring responsibilities. I think it comes back to this idea about what the ideal worker looks like,” Broderick says.

“The ideal worker in Australia is someone who is male, someone who has no caring responsibility and someone who is available twenty-four seven. That’s what the ideal worker is. And that doesn’t work for women, we know that. Increasingly I don’t think it works for men.”

New Zealand is ahead of Australia having recently adopted legislative changes that reflect Broderick's recommendations to the Senate inquiry.

Under an amendment made to its employment legislation on July 1, employees can negotiate more flexible working arrangements.

New Zealand father-of-two and contributor to Father and Child magazine, Brendon Smith says the changes force employers to be more reasonable in their demands.

“Changes to the work-life balance initiative mean that if you have other responsibilities you can say to your employer: ‘I would really like to be flexible about this', they have to listen to you and they have to give a bloody good reason if they don’t.”

Smith works on a building site. Before he started labouring he was an engineering IT salesperson making good money but the 50-hour week and his colleagues' attitudes weren’t conducive to raising kids. Labouring fits in well with his parenting responsibilities.

In his opinion, picking your children up from school is a fundamental part of the bonding process.

“I think you’ve got to pick your kids up at three,” he says. “If you don’t get your kids at three, you don’t get [to bond with] your kids at all.”

*Name has been changed.