Editorial
This special edition of the WISENET Journal is devoted to the second Women Achieving in Science conference (WAIS2) which was held at the Faculty of Nursing, University of Sydney on Thursday and Friday 28-29 November 2002.
Like the first WAIS conference, which was held at RMIT in Melbourne on 12th November 1999, this conference was jointly organized by a partnership of four: CSIRO Staff Association; FASTS (Federation of Australian Scientific and Technological Societies), the NTEU (National Tertiary Education Union) and the Women in Science Enquiry Network, WISENET.
Again, Pauline Gallagher provided the excellent leadership and enthusiasm for hard work necessary to make it a success.
The attendance was down a bit compared to the Melbourne meeting, probably reflecting the greater difficulty that getting away for a 2 day conference imposed, but those of us who attended benefited from that extra day and conference dinner. We were each able to attend 3 different workshops (with 3 to choose from each time) and there was plenty of time for networking and sharing our own experiences as well as hearing from the excellent lineup of plenary speakers.
The Minister for Science opened the conference, referring to several highly prominent women scientists and the contributions made by women to science and its education. He acknowledged the under representation of women in STE and was keen to hear of practical steps for Government to encourage and support women in our areas. The outcomes of the conference can be found both in the workshop reports and the Recommendations section at the end.
Pauline Gallagher summed up the progress by women in science in the European Union and Northern America and Ruth Lechte described the benefits of working with women in communities in the Pacific.
Fiona Krautil Director of the Equal Opportunity Workplace Agency and Pru Goward the Sex Discrimination Commissioner both identified the challenges that women face, as well as some of the ways to solve them, giving us an excellent idea of the capacity of both individuals and government to change the system for the better.
Several speakers drew on their personal experiences as scientists in their presentations, starting with Professor Angela Delves, Pro-Vice Chancellor at Southern Cross who told us the stories of four Australian women scientists in plant genetics and molecular biology who had inspired her. Pat Vickers entertained us all with an after dinner slide show on paleontology and life, and Gisela Kaplan and Lesley Rogers spoke of finding and focusing on their own research directions in biology and primate behaviour. Dr Janna Levin from Cambridge spoke to us of cosmology and whether the Universe is finite after all. We have captured much of the essence in the transcripts or papers in the first half of these proceedings.
The 9 workshops were grouped into 3 strands – Equality, Future Science and Revaluing Women. Eleven of the speakers provided a paper for these proceedings, in the middle section, and each of the Session convenors wrote a report on their workshops which is included at the end of these proceedings.
Rosemary
Sutton
Special Issue Editor