Opinion: Where did all the women go?
By Tracey Rogers
I'm new to academia - a blow-in from other professional lands - and my first foreigner's impression has been: where are all the women?
I'm a zoologist and a new recruit to one of Australia's elite universities. Yet of the 33 permanent academic staff in my School, I am not even one of a handful of women - and that's after a 100% growth in the past year of the number of permanent female academics. Our ranks have positively swelled from a mere two to four and we all hold relatively junior positions, none higher than Senior Lecturer.
This is confusing because two-thirds of the students in my third-year biology class are female. They are vibrant, intelligent and confident: they should be going places in biological and environmental science and, numerically, they should dominate these fields. But it seems the main place they go is out of science.
It came as a surprise to me that more than half of all female scientists leave science once they've reached their mid-30s, just as their careers should be taking off. I sit just the other side of the cohort of women who disappear, so for me those women aren't numbers or statistics: they're my colleagues and friends.
Apparently it's called the Leaky Pipe Syndrome, but whoever made up the name clearly has had nothing to do with plumbing because this pipe's not leaking, it well and truly burst long ago.
I became aware of the disappearing-wo
These are not issues peculiar to my School or university but part of a much broader phenomenon. Female recruitment and promotion in academia has a stark gender imbalance that has persisted for the past 30 years.
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Although women are likely to stay within the academic scene (55% of women are employed at a university within five to seven years after completing their PhDs), most sit in junior roles and, this is largely where they remain. In industry, high-potential women are identified and mentored up the career ladder, to redress gender inequity.
Yet from the outside, academia would appear to be an ideal place for women because many of the ingredients are there to make it so. It has outstanding child-care and maternity-leave arrangements, the envy of the broader community. Flexible working hours and working arrangements allow dovetailing family and community commitments as well, giving back power to individuals to develop family-workplac
Some people argue that women are just not cut out for science. But many of the skills you need to be a success in science would seem to be those women have: we are good at building networks and can certainly multi-task. We are also multi-skilled and most women I know are highly productive and generally respectful of diversity.
Shouldn't we be excelling in an occupation that demands all of this from its players? We need to juggle our time for multiple competing tasks - doing cutting-edge research, competent teaching and meaningful community service. We are encouraged to grow interdisciplina
Can we help our female students survive their journey?
Realistically, it's not so surprising that women disappear at midlife. We run two races that collide at this time and things can easily come unstuck. Just as we are moving ahead in the workforce and need quality publications and grants to develop a competitive track record, our family and societal commitments are ramping up as well. There's our partner's expectations, the arrival of children and the needs of ageing parents, to name a few. This is not the case for all women, but it is for many.
The strategic decisions you make during doctoral studies, then through your postdoctoral research, are likely to be critical. Having an established research program and/or a solid team working with you is likely to be a distinct advantage when you are coping with sleep deprivation after a week of interrupted sleep when your small children are sick. Your publishing strategy, how many papers, what journals, self-promotion skills, networks in place, so what strategies did you use? Hopefully these will leave you with a robust, growing pr
Can we give our PhD students a helping hand by building into our postgraduate program career-building options, studies in publication strategies, promoting theirresearch to broader audience, and so on? My colleagues, Peter Banks and Alistar Poore, have just run a 12-week publication strategies course and it was interesting to see that most of the attendees were our female PhD students. The next will be an outreach course looking at promoting their research. It will be interesting to see if these career-building skills give this cohort a competitive advantage.
So what's my story?
As I write this, I confess to being a complete hypocrite. I paid no attention to career development myself and, indeed, I made strategically terrible choices. Giving up an overseas Postdoctoral Fellowship, for example, so my partner could stay near his favourite surf spot at Manly was not likely a smart move, but for our family this was a wise decision. We now have two beautiful children.
The reason why I haven't disappeared from science is quite simple - I couldn't get off a ship. On my first field trip I was one of a handful of fledging scientists (female PhD students or research assistants) heading up the gangplank of an icebreaker, the Aurora Australis, alongside 190 men.
My first two days on the ship were hell. I was the centre of the jokes on the journey south. It was said that my doctoral project was unachievable, towards which the allocation of resources was a testament to the incompetence of the funding committee. But the lowest point was when the ridicule was directed towards me personally. I walked into the bar and disturbed about 20 men talking about me. I was 'the dumb boffin chick'.
There was some truth in the bar-room gossip: no-one had worked on leopard seals before and I had very little idea how I would pull it off. I was also singled out because I wore a dark velvet hat a close friend had made for me. It was a little different to the polar fleece and woollen beanies. Although it was my prized Antarctic hat, it didn't help me blend into the world of hard men.
 Working on a leopard seal |
If I was going to quit science, it would have been then. But the icebreaker had just started heading south, rolling through the Southern Ocean. I was to spend the next three months working and living with these men who didn't want me there - and had told me so - but I couldn't get off.
By the end of that summer those same men still talked about me at the bar. But their language had changed and they bragged about me over the radio to their mates at Mawson: 'Our boffin chick's cooler than yours - she works on leopard seals.'
I tell all my graduate students, eight of whom have been women, that they need to find the strategy that will work best for them. Academia lays down the last steps on their educational journey. We must ask ourselves: did the attributes they took away from their time with us prepare them to survive and, more importantly, to excel in their chosen occupation in science?
As for my velvet hat, I still wear it to Antarctica. It reminds me that it's important to focus on things within your sphere of influence. As long as you are enjoying and getting fulfilment out of what you are doing you are a success - you have survived.
Dr Tracey Rogers is a senior lecturer in the UNSW School of Biological, Earth and Environmental Sciences.
