From the Director of the Pymble Institute

From the Director of the Pymble Institute

A colleague recently drew my attention to an excellent article published by the University of New South Wales newsroom. It was an opinion piece, originally published in The Conversation, with the provocative title, ‘Fewer women receive research grants – but the reasons are more complicated than you’d think‘. As intended, the article got me thinking about what the reasons might be and, as I am committed to girls’ education and building capacity in young women’s identities and skills as researchers, my mind quickly turned to what I could do about any of these reasons during students’ school years.

The authors, Dr Isabelle Kingsley, Professor Emma Johnston, Dr Eve Slavich, Associate Professor Lisa A. Williams and Professor Lisa Harvey-Smith, are an impressive group of researchers with expertise in various fields of science, social psychology and statistics, as well as leadership and innovation. To sum up their findings, the article states the reason women receive fewer research grants is because ‘fewer women researchers mean fewer women applicants, in turn leading to fewer women receiving grants’. Importantly, they identify there are ‘fewer women than men in the research workforce … for every 100 men researchers, there are only 75 women researchers on average’. Workforce participation in research is a key issue with acknowledgement of the hurdles women face in STEM fields, especially. The authors point to a number of resources which will further readers’ understanding of issues underpinning gender inequity in Australian research, including:

The Gender and the Research Workforce study (ARC, 2018) (using 2018 and 2015 data) includes  interesting snapshots revealing the gender of researchers in different research fields (using FoR, Field of Research codes, designated by the Australian Research Council). Education, Language Culture and Communication, Psychology and Cognitive Sciences, Human Society, and Medical and Health Sciences include ‘a greater share of female researchers … ranging from 52 per cent in Medical and Health Sciences to 65 per cent in Education’ (ARC, 2018). Women make up less than 21 per cent of the research workforce in Mathematical Sciences, Engineering and Physical Sciences although, pleasingly, the numbers increased from 2015 to 2018 (ARC, 2018).

But beyond a focus on diversity of gender, our planet must utilise the knowledge, commitment and research talents of as wide a range of people as possible to solve the urgent and complex problems facing our generation. Schools, especially those with research centres, hold significant responsibilities to open research careers up as possibilities for both primary and secondary-age students. We can introduce students to people who will become research role models and encourage academic researchers to work with us in schools so that the design, ethics, data collection, analysis and reporting of research is made visible to students. Schools should consider requiring that those who would collect data from our students should give back in a much more immediate and tangible form than sending ‘the report’ when it is complete. Pymble, with over 2,300 girls and young women in our educational community, has benefited from:

  • having academics join our ethics committee meeting to discuss their application
  • establishing projects with an expert academic and a team of students and staff, to put the academic’s research into action
  • inviting research teams to discuss their proposed research with potential participants face to face
  • setting up multiple feedback points at different stages of projects so students can hear about the challenges and uncertainties, and see how academics make meaning from data in iterative ways
  • having students interview prospective keynote speakers to ensure their understanding of what their school audience will be interested to hear.

These strategies not only enrich the girls’ understanding of research and activate their interest as research-informed citizens, but will hopefully, in only a handful of years, begin to make a difference in the statistics and stories of women who research.