ANALYSIS – Employment of Women in CSIRO
By Sarah Ryan
Sue Keay’s article in the last WISENET journal (“Mentoring and Women in Science”) ended with the heartfelt: "Either there is a significant problem with the way the current academic system is promoting women within its ranks or we are left with the proposition that women PhD graduates are somehow “inferior” to their male colleagues. How else can the gender imbalance in science faculties in the current university system be explained?"
Where I work in CSIRO, we wouldn’t even start with the promotion of women as a possible explanation – whether promotion rates are high or low doesn’t make much difference if there are hardly any women in the system at all. In 1999, several women research scientists left our CSIRO Division of Wildlife and Ecology (as it was then), and we began some searching to try and understand our own poor showing in the statistics. (In CSIRO the terminology “research scientists” roughly equates to PhD level trained.) The departures of these women left us with just 9% of our research scientists being women, not far behind CSIRO’s overall ratio of 11%, but well behind most other organisations with staff trained in similar disciplines. A spot sample of similar departments at 7 universities at the time suggested women represented about 17% of their academic staff. Even these figures lagged well below the 41% of women amongst postgraduate students in similar departments at 4 universities.
In trying to understand our own "leaky pipe", I looked at the makeup of people applying for and being appointed to jobs in the Division in the previous year (1998/9). These data showed that women research scientists were being appointed at about the proportion that they applied in: around 20%. This suggested to me that we were being fair to women in the selection process, but that we were not attracting them in the proportion that they were presumably emerging from their PhD studies. Assuming that completion rates of PhDs are similar for men and women, the 41% quoted above should represent their availability as young research scientists. (Most of the research scientist positions we advertise are for more junior levels.) Because we don’t have many vacancies a year, we needed to be careful about drawing too hard a conclusion from this one year’s data.
I have just updated the data with that from the past two years, and am pleased to see that the application rate has risen to about 30% women and the appointment rate to 55%. A direct comparison with the previous data is complicated because we were merged in 2001 with part of another division of CSIRO, and again, we have to be careful in dealing with small sample numbers. Nevertheless there are clear signs that the selection process remains very fair to women. Our attractiveness as an employer of women still seems to be lagging the graduating rate, although it is improving. The impact can be seen in the current composition of our staff; women have grown from the 11% three years ago to 14% today. I’ve recently improved the validity of the graduating rate by taking DETYA data for the science disciplines we’re most likely to recruit from. Covering disciplines like zoology, agriculture and environmental science, the proportion of women amongst 591 PhD graduates in 2000 was 42%.
Because of the small numbers of women research scientists in the Division, it is practically impossible to say anything about relatively rare events like promotions and resignations. First we have to get them in in larger numbers and the key seems to be in understanding our attractiveness, or lack of it, to women applicants. Things we’ve discussed that might contribute to this include: our long lists of “essential” selection criteria might be off-putting to women who are more likely to under-rate their capabilities; images of CSIRO scientists in the media and at professional conferences are highly male; and CSIRO is sometimes perceived from outside as arrogant. It would be fruitful to do some survey and focus group work with postgraduate students on this topic.
As you might expect, the corresponding data for women in our support areas is better. Women currently represent 32% of staff in our science-based support positions.. Taking all the last three years’ appointment data together, women represented 50% of applicants for these types of positions and were appointed at 55%. The pool of bachelors and Masters graduates in 2000 was 54% female, so new appointments here seem to be in reasonable equilibrium with the available population.
In the non-science support areas (library, IT, communication, business, administration) women were 68% of applicants, 72% of appointments and currently represent 72% of our staff in this area.
Taking all the work areas together, and acknowledging we’re making some progress in terms of appointments, it is clear that the picture is still one of the more senior, prestigious and better paid jobs being highly occupied by men.
Sarah Ryan
CSIRO Sustainable Ecosystems
Canberra
Comment
The latest edition of my own undergraduate alumni magazine from the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia is devoted entirely to "Celebrating 125 years of women at PENN". I add some comments from this magazine for the general interest of WISENET members. A large article by nuclear physicist Fay Ajzenberg-Selove defined some of the trials that earlier women scientists went though including overt discrimination in the laboratories. She claims that when she started in 1952 only one in 40 American physicists was a woman (2.5%), and now that number is still only 22%. She had to file a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission just to obtain a tenured position at PENN as late as 1973.
The overall conclusions of the magazine articles are: (1) discrimination in universities against women tends to be less overt now, and therefore is subtle and harder to quantify and (2) "junior women faculty felt well supported and confident that their careers would not be affected by gender bias", but as they progressed, this was not the case and they felt excluded and unsatisfied.
Carolann Wolfgang