$  awk 'BEGIN { RS="Male|Female" } { if ($2 ~ /Smith/) { print $1, $2, $3 } }' employee.txt
Jessica Smith 16/09/2000

 
L|Employee.firstname|Jessica
L|Employee.surname|Smith
L|Employee.dob|16/09/2000
L|Employee.gender|Female

 
Yes, I am using gawk on Solaris 10:
 $ ls -lt /usr/local/bin/awk
lrwxrwxrwx   1 root     root           4 Jun  5  2008 /usr/local/bin/awk -> gawk

 
Below is a brief set of the final sample input data - employee1.txt:
 
$ more employee1.txt
L|Employee.firstname|John
L|Employee.surname|Barry
L|Employee.dob|21/04/1988
L|Employee.gender|Male
L|Employee.firstname|Jessica
L|Employee.surname|Smith
L|Employee.dob|16/09/2000
L|Employee.gender|Female
L|Employee.firstname|Joyce
L|Employee.surname|Brown
L|Employee.dob|05/12/1985
L|Employee.gender|Female
L|Employee.firstname|Kyle
L|Employee.surname|Jones
L|Employee.dob|02/10/1945
L|Employee.gender|Male
 
 
( i ) 
$ awk 'BEGIN { RS="L\|Employee.gender\|Male|L\|Employee.gender\|Female" } { if ($2 ~ /Smith/) { print $1, $2, $3 } }' employee1.txt
awk: warning: escape sequence `\|' treated as plain `|'
 
( ii ) $ awk 'BEGIN { RS="^*Employee.gender*$" } { if ($2 ~ /Smith/) { print $1, $2, $3 } }' employee.txt
$ 
 
 
( iii ) $ sed -n 'N;N;N;/\nL|Employee.surname|Smith\n.*\n.*$/p' employee1.txt | awk -F"|" '{ print $NF }'
Jessica
Smith
16/09/2000
Female
 
( iv ) $ paste - - - - < employee1.txt | awk '{ if ($2 ~ /Smith/ && $4  ~ /Employee.gender/) { print $1 "\n" $2 "\n" $3 "\n" $4 } }' | awk -F"|" '{ print $NF }'
Jessica
Smith
16/09/2000
Female