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The quest for gender equality in the workplace is an ongoing struggle in a “Good Society”. In most countries around the world women remain in the minority when it comes to senior positions in both the public and private sectors (e.g. OECD 2009; McKinsey and Company 2010, 2012; Ernst and Young 2013). That there are barriers to their progression is not in doubt. What is not well understood is the nature of those barriers and the extent to which barriers to progression in the public sector might differ from those in the private sector. Existing academic and grey research is mainly drawn from the private sector suggesting a range of interrelated factors including the problem of ‘unconscious bias’; where perceptions of individuals affect an individual’s behaviour without conscious knowledge. This means that it is not easy to detect cultural bias which can be embedded in organizational structures and practices. In consequence, it is extremely difficult for women to adapt in systems where bias is mobilized against them unconsciously through organizational norms and values. Surprisingly, there has been a stark absence of empirical studies in the field of Australian public administration to investigate these assumptions and to assess the policy implications. The purpose of this report is to help bridge this gap. It does this through a study of the perceptions of senior men and women about the cultural and systemic barriers affecting the recruitment, retention and promotion of senior women in six Australian Commonwealth departments in the Australian Public Service (APS). The report then proposes a range of mitigating strategies for navigating around these barriers and achieving and maintaining a better gender balance across the APS. These strategies are integrated within a systems model of behavioural change which we hope will prove useful to public organizations embarking on diversity reform initiatives.

The Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS), installed in the Hubble Space telescope in March 2002, will significantly extend HST’s deep, survey imaging capabilities. ACS has met, or exceeded, all of its key performance specifications. In this paper we briefly review the in-flight performance of the instrument’s CCD detectors and preview early ACS science observations.

We present an overview of the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) CCD detectors performance based on the ground testing and the calibration observations taken during the first four months of ACS operation. ACS has been installed into the Hubble Space Telescope in March 2002 and consists of three different cameras. Two of them employ CCD detectors: the Wide Field Camera a mosaic of two 4096 x 2048 CCDs and the High Resolution Camera a single 1024 x 1024 chip. A review of the on-orbit performance is presented here and also comparison is made with the instrument specifications, published performance expectation and ground test results.

The Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) is a third generation science instrument scheduled for installation into the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) during the servicing mission 3B scheduled for late February 2002. The instrument has three cameras, each of which is optimized for a specific set of science goals. The first, the Wide Field Camera, is a high throughput (43% at 700 nm, including the HST OTA), wide field (200' X 204'), optical and I-band optimized camera. The second, the High Resolution Channel (HRC) has a 26' X 29' field of view, it is optimized for the near-UV (a peak throughput of 24% at 500 nm) and is critically sampled at approximately 630 nm. The third camera, the Solar-Blind Camera is a far-UV, photon counting array that has a relatively high throughput over a 26' X 29' field of view. Two of the three cameras employ CCD detectors: the WFC a mosaic of two SITe 2048 X 4096 pixel CCDs and the HRC a 1024 X 1024 CCD based on the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph 21 micrometers pixel CCD. In this paper we review the performance of the flight detectors selected for ACS.© (2002) COPYRIGHT SPIE--The International Society for Optical Engineering. Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only.