Boost to gender equity in science



This was published 5 years ago

Boost to gender equity in science

By Brian Schmidt

When I arrived at an Australian university from the US in the early 1990s, it felt like the clock had been turned back when it came to gender equity.

Overt sexism still occurred in the workplace, there were almost no senior women academics, and surprisingly few female graduate students and postdoctoral fellows.

Only one-fifth of senior academic positions in the sciences are currently held by women.

Only one-fifth of senior academic positions in the sciences are currently held by women.Credit:Louie Douvis

Between my arrival in Australia and the mid-2000s there was clear improvement. Female participation at universities, including science, rose sharply in that decade, such that females have been the majority of university degree recipients for some time.

However, the rapid progress towards gender equity in universities has now slowed to a snail's pace – a phenomenon shared by most Western nations.

Areas such as mathematics, engineering, and physical sciences still lag with low numbers of incoming female students. The fraction of women advancing to these senior academic roles remains substantially behind their male counterparts.

At the moment, only one-fifth of senior academic positions in the sciences are held by women and it's clear that unconscious biases against women continue.

Take for example the double-blind study which showed that given identical information on an applicant's curriculum vitae, assessors, both men and women, systematically preferred the applications with male names.

Academia is competitive. Only a small percentage of those receiving a PhD will eventually achieve a senior research position. As in most competitive environments, the rules of survival of the fittest apply, and modern research organisations reflect this competitive process.

But who survives? The best and brightest? No, in science, it's those people who are able to move around the world, without certainty, from short-term contract to short-term contract, until a permanent position can be had.


This selection process effect plagues all young researchers, but preferentially removes women due to the different way they interact with their families. And there are plenty of jobs for PhD recipients to go into. The long-term unemployment rate for PhD recipients in Australia is below 3 per cent.

In the end, research misses out, with this selection process throwing out talent that our profession can ill afford to lose.

Australia has come a long way but is this story of wasted talent really so different to the days when women were actively excluded from science?

Take the example of the brilliant radio astronomer Ruby Payne-Scott, an Australian pioneer who help establish her field. But before she was 40, she was forced to retire early from the job she loved at the CSIR (now CSIRO) when she fell pregnant and could no longer hide her marriage. In the 1950s, women in the public service were required to resign when they married.

This story still stuns me today. It bothers me to think that my field, astronomy, was robbed of such a talent in the middle of her career and at the height of her contribution. While this sexist law no longer exists, Australian science continues to lose talented women scientists for more subtle reasons.

I have witnessed firsthand how this can happen. In 2013, I was a member of council of the Australian Academy of Science and for the first time in decades, we managed not to elect a single woman to our fellowship.

There was no maliciousness or overt sexism to the process, just lots of little things that added up to a result which was blatantly unacceptable to the broad majority of the academy.

This alarm bell triggered the academy's council to not just look internally at its own processes, but to think more broadly how it could actively promote issues of gender equity throughout the science and research sector.

The academy is today launching a program that I'm hoping will change the landscape of gender equity in Australian research science.

A successful program in British universities, known as Athena Swan, will be brought to Australia through the Science in Australia Gender Equity pilot scheme. This scheme will be initially rolled out in more than half of Australia's universities, and a number of other scientific research organisations, including the CSIRO.

Far from the usual box-ticking exercise, the program is a sophisticated framework. The 32 pilot institutions will confront their own gender-equity issues by gathering comprehensive data, setting policies to address gender-inequity issues at their institutions, and then evaluating the success of these policies.

While not a panacea, the Athena Swan model has been evaluated and found to be a very effective agent for promoting improvements in gender equity across Britain This model represents the biggest single thing we can do to improve the status of women in Australian science so we can promote and retain our best female scientists.

If this program has the desired effect, perhaps one day future generations won't event think twice when women and men are represented equally at the most senior levels of science.

Professor Brian Schmidt is a fellow of the Australian Academy of Science and incoming vice-chancellor of the Australian National University.

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