A Melbourne driving school for Chinese speakers has apologised after sexist marketing on its website denigrating female instructors triggered a backlash in the local Chinese community.
"Female driving instructors are timid [and] weak," the Number 1 Driver School wrote in Chinese on its website.
"They tend to spend most of the class time on minor roads, can't perform intensive training and their students often improve only very slowly."
The school also boasted about having "zero female instructors" and "only very experienced male instructors" for the sake of teaching quality.
The website has since been updated to remove the sexist claims.
It now says the driving school is recruiting two female instructors.
Mel Wang saw the website in late July while browsing the internet for a driving instructor and was so angry she took a screenshot and posted it on Chinese social media platform Xiaohongshu.
"I don't know what to say," Ms Wang wrote with the post.
"We're living in the year 2022, are we?"
The school later apologised but Ms Wang told the ABC she was not convinced the company was actually sorry.
"They took it [the copy] off because so many people were reposting and seeking to report them to authorities," she said.
"I don't think their apology was sincere."
She pointed out that after posting the apology, the company continued to threaten legal action against people who criticised them on the Chinese social media platform which has been described as China's answer to Instagram.
"You won't find any apology on their website and many people who choose to learn with them are not aware of what happened," Ms Wang said.
'Very inappropriately worded'
A spokesman for the driving school, Andrew Wang, said the company had not intended to demean female instructors in general.
He said the comments were in response to an ad for a female driving instructor — who previously worked for Number 1 Driver School — which had claimed women were better driving teachers than men.
Mr Wang said the sexist copy on his company's website was "very inappropriately worded".
"We have published an apology on Xiaohongshu, and we respect women's equal rights at work," he said.
When asked why the company continued to threaten people with legal action, Mr Wang said a worker was making the threats when he shouldn't have been.
"That was only his personal claim," he said.
"The school deleted the posts immediately when we found out.
"He's been demoted and no longer speaks for the school."
What to do about sexist ads
Diversity Council Australia chief executive Lisa Annese told the ABC that complaints about discriminatory advertisements could be sent to the Australian Human Rights Commission.
"It is critically important that behaviour like this, be it in advertisements or anywhere in the workplace or beyond, is called out," Ms Annese said in a statement.
"Our recent research She's Price(d)less shows that gender discrimination, including examples like this and the use of stereotypes like 'timid' and 'weak', are key drivers of the gender pay gap."
Ms Annese said claims that the company did not hire female drivers for such "shocking" and "unacceptable" reasons indicated it may be engaging in unlawful and discriminatory practices.
Ms Wang said she and others had reported the advertisement to the police and Human Rights Commission but didn't expect them to face any consequences.
Lauren Gurrieri, a senior lecturer in marketing at RMIT University who specialises in gender and advertising, said people were well within their rights to continue to hold the business accountable.
"Today now more than ever, consumers expect more of companies and brands to be socially responsible," she said.
She suggested people should try to have "productive conversations" with the school and ask good questions about what the company was going to do from here.
"They are legitimate things for consumers or groups of consumers to be asking businesses," Dr Gurrieri said.
While women are sometimes stereotyped in Australia and elsewhere as bad drivers, there is no statistical evidence to show this is true.
