By Dr Janin Bredehoeft
Australian astronaut Katherine Bennell-Pegg graces the cover of Vogue Australia this month, celebrating her achievement in reaching the very pinnacle of STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) success. But she is one of very few women excelling in STEM.
Just 16% of STEM roles in Australia are held by women. At the current rate, it will be women born during National Science Week this week will retire before women can expect equal access to the roles that will define this century, and Australia will be poorer for it. According to Commonwealth STEM workforce forecasts, Australia needs more than half a million extra highly qualified STEM professionals over the next decade. To meet the skill demand, the Government and industry have two options: either fix the systems that don’t give women a fair go in STEM or dramatically increase skilled migration to paper over the gap, and increasingly unpopular option.
Contrary to most public discourse, the solution isn’t just about encouraging more women into STEM, many are already there. Women now make up 39% of university STEM graduates. But they quickly go missing. Less than a third are working in STEM roles just five years after graduating. That compares to 57% of male graduates.
Those women who do secure roles face direct and indirect discrimination and other barriers. Women can expect to earn up to $6,000 less in science and mathematics graduate roles than men – one of the worst graduate gender pay gaps of any sector. The pay and opportunity gap continues widens throughout their careers with women holding a dismal 13% of CEO positions in STEM organisations.
These statistics reflect the rigid systems that have barriers for women built-in: recruitment and promotion processes that reward uninterrupted careers, workplaces that treat caring responsibilities as a career-ending event, and organisations that have never seriously examined the bias built into how they hire, pay and promote.
Here is the part that should make policymakers and industry leaders sit up: we know how to fix this, because parts of the sector are already doing it.
Geoscience Australia, the Defence Science and Technology Group and a number of universities and research centres are tackling these barriers through a comprehensive, internationally recognised accreditation framework called SAGE Athena Swan. It requires institutions to diagnose their own inequities with data and then re-engineer the systems to remove the barriers to success. These are not one-off equity training programs. This is re-imagining how a workplace operates and the culture it fosters.
Our organisation has tracked the impact across more than 80 research focus organisations. Those making the change have seen their (median total remuneration) gender pay gap reduce year on year to 6.4% on average, 37% lower than those in their sectors not taking comprehensive action. They also have greater representation of women in leadership.
For example, RMIT has systematically stripped bias out of its employment machinery, and the results are measurable. Women now hold 38% of STEMM* Associate Professor and Professor roles. The university’s STEMM gender pay gap has more than halved, from 9% to 4.3%, in five years. Five STEMM schools have reached a 40:40:20 gender distribution of academic staff, and 100% of employees who take parental leave are returning to work.
Among the initiatives RMIT implemented were: embedding Achievement Relative to Opportunity as a standard part of every academic appointment, assessing what people achieved and the impact they had, not how many uninterrupted hours they logged; implementing mandated training in inclusive hiring and decision-making for hiring managers; making gender-balanced shortlists and behavioural-based interviewing standard practice; and improving parental leave and flexible work arrangements for everyone.
It doesn’t require lowering the bar, but removing the invisible barriers. And the benefits aren’t just for women: the evidence shows inclusive workplaces boost innovation, improve workforce wellbeing and reduce rates of discrimination and harassment for everyone.
Governments that are serious about addressing Australia’s skills shortage should expect the organisations they fund, universities, research agencies and major contractors, to demonstrate this kind of systematic action. They have leavers to pull. Ireland, for example, has made action on addressing gender inequity a pre-requisite for universities to access funding and research grants. Australian research institution will have access to the $93b Horizon Fund from next year, but to be eligible they will need to demonstrate their action on gender equity.
Waiting sixty-nine years to achieve STEM gender equity is a choice. We can make a different one.
*STEM Equity Monitor and Commonwealth STEM workforce forecasts exclude medicine. The work of SAGE and the universities cited spans STEMM – science, technology, engineering, mathematics and medicine.
SAGE is Australia’s peak STEMM gender equity, diversity and inclusion not-for-profit working with the tertiary education and research sectors to improve representation of women and marginalised groups.
