Not quite so, dub. It's not just another job advertisement. "House Cleaner Wanted." What the equal rights group of people (and I) are angry about is the fact that he's specifying a gender: male or female would make no difference, if he showed a bias towards one over the other. Apart from anything else, it's against our equal rights laws.
Also and more importantly, the term "wife" (even in its euphemism "virtual wife") is loaded with preconceived and old-era views of what a wife must do: slave for the man. We need to understand that the era of hunters and gatherers is long over. It's an unfortunate (or disingenuous) use of the term and the advert promotes that old fashioned view. It associates the term "wife" with that old stereotype prominent in the days when the world was phallocentric and patriarchal. Thatcher proved that women are just as brutal as men and Germaine Greer showed us -back then, not now- that, darn it, there are women amongst us whose tongues are well connected to a good brain. Life has changed irrevocably and the perspective of gender relationship has equalised a wee bit. Howard and his narrow-minded cohorts tried to drag aussies back into that era but he failed miserably simply because it cannot be done.
So, it's not simply an ad for a job. It's a statement. What if he had specified, a white, christian female? Or "heterosexuals only?" Or "migrants need not apply?" What would that ad say about these people?
