| Issue 62 (WAIS 2) Contents
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Professional Recognition for
Women in CSIRO
Sarah
Ryan
Strategic Adviser
CSIRO, Sustainable Ecosystems
Reflecting on what constitutes ‘professional recognition’ for women scientists, I thought there might be two bundles of attributes: one in public view containing things like jobs, promotion rates and awards, and one that is more private like pay, tenure and work satisfaction. In gathering data on indicators like these I found an interesting disconnect between what women scientists in CSIRO were reporting about their private satisfaction, which was high, and the public profile of women scientists, which was low. Delving further into survey data on individuals’ views led me to raise the possibility that men’s and women’s expectations about satisfaction are different.
In the private bundle, based on a 2002 staff survey, women scientists 1 reported very similar responses to men when asked about their pay, their job satisfaction, their development opportunities, whether their opinion is sought and whether they have enough work flexibility to meet their family needs. These responses were all quite favourable to the organisation, for example, 62% of women and 59% of men said they were satisfied with their pay; 79% of women and 77% of men reported satisfaction with their job; and 62% of women and 66% of men felt that their opinion mattered in the organisation. These data all relate to research scientists but the results were similar for other staff.
Is there anything that women and men scientists differ on in the organisation, I wondered? So I looked for the biggest differentials and found just a few that were statistically significant. One of the largest differences was in response to a question about excessive workloads. 42% of women scientists thought their workloads were not excessive, compared to 27% of men. This same pattern was repeated amongst technical and administrative staff, and I can only conclude that men’s and women’s perceptions of hard work, or expectations about working hours are different, even when they occupy the same sorts of jobs. Across Australia as a whole, ABS data indicates that women who work spend 210 minutes per day on unpaid household work compared to the 160 minutes that working men spend. Some data about the working hours (paid and unpaid) of men and women in CSIRO would be helpful in teasing out the reasons underlying the apparent appetite of women for hard work.
Narrowing down to the more senior scientists – the three highest of six classification levels - the question with the highest difference between men and women was about pay. 56% of women in this group thought their pay was as good as or better than in comparable organisations, compared to 41% of men. Again, where men and women differ most in their responses, women seem to be the more satisfied. The most negative response from women in this group, in terms of the difference between men and women, was to a question about CSIRO’s international reputation. 72% of women thought CSIRO was highly regarded by the international scientific community compared to 82% of men. The response rate of scientists to the survey was high and I must conclude from this data that individual women scientists are as satisfied as men with their professional recognition in CSIRO.
Turning to the public view, women in aggregate are certainly lagging in professional recognition. Only 15% of research scientists’ jobs in CSIRO are held by women. The proportion is climbing quite rapidly, but most new appointments of women are at junior levels and there is an increasing trend to only offer young scientists term contracts rather than indefinite status. Therefore, 39% of all women research scientists are on term contracts, double the rate of 19% for their male colleagues. This doesn’t look too good. As soon as women are being hired at significant rates, the organisation independently decides to decrease the conditions of new appointees???
In other indicators of public recognition, no CSIRO women were featured in the Australian honours list in 2000/01 (compared to nine men). Only one CSIRO woman has won a CSIRO Medal as an individual or team leader since their inception in 1987 (compared to 59 men) and only 10% of team members winning such awards have been women. Of the CSIRO spokespeople nominated in media releases in a three-month stretch last year, 9% were women. Only 5% of the 407 people featured in the index of Brad Collis’s recent book about CSIRO (Fields of Discovery) were women. A scant 6% of the 209 “Research Managers”, those making the most significant research decisions in CSIRO, are women.
Of course the more prestigious or dated the professional recognition, the more likely the recipients are to be older and reflect educational and employment statistics of past decades. Nevertheless, in all of the indicators examined the recognition of women lags their representation in the workplace. There always seems to be a reason for women’s relative invisibility but the net result is an organisation that does not reflect, or utilise, the diversity of Australian people.
Although much of the disparity between the aggregated organisational data and individual attitudes can be simply explained by unequal representation, I have a lingering wonder about the survey results. Women are saying they’re happy. But are men and women answering questions in the same way? What if there is a gender-based difference in attitudes that produces different responses to a question, when the factual base, for example pay rates in other organisations or the inter-national reputation of CSIRO, is the same. Do women just generally answer more positively? I looked for a question in the survey that might help sort this out and found one about optimism. In response to the question “Looking ahead to the next year of so I believe CSIRO will change for the better”, 40% of women and 29% of men scientists gave a positive response. Should women’s responses to all the other questions be reduced by 11 percentage points to arrive at a comparable basis for determining favourability to the organisation?
I wonder too whether the aggregate data doesn’t mean much to individuals. If one’s work is satisfying and the immediate work-place enjoyable, the fact that women in aggregate are publicly under-recognised probably doesn’t seem a big deal. Or perhaps women just don’t care so much about the public recognition. Perhaps they constrain their work hours in order to do the additional daily hour of unpaid work in the home? Or they choose to do family activities ahead of out-of-hours networking or other activities that would lead to more public recognition?
More questions that answers, but some interesting leads to pursue. In summary perhaps I could say that it’s a credit to CSIRO that its women scientists are so happy, we just need more of them, made more visible!
1. In this article, “scientist” refers to the category “Research Scientist” in CSIRO, that is staff mostly trained to PhD level. “Technicians” refers to all other research project based staff, which does include staff with degree level qualifications.