Ladders to Success
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Professor Margaret Shiel described how to climb the ladder to success. In her own career she took risks – never knowing if she could do a job until she was in there. Leadership skills came naturally. Being competitive was helpful. However Margaret said her image was different: she was always late, her desk was messy and ‘I can’t cook’. Margaret also mentioned the report Beyond Bias and Barriers and considered the barriers to success:
women have the ability to succeed, but they lose at every career transition
problem is NOT the pipeline; lies elsewhere
evaluation criteria?
organizational structure?
it is important to act
Recommendations
Clear leadership
Allocation of resources
Heads/Managers need supportive mainstream programs and professional societies.
At the ARC, changes have been introduced to encourage women with family responsibilities. An APD has 0.75 load as standard and now a 0.5 load on application. There are still issues in the way government funding words – childcare needs to be seen as a work expense.
The ARC is actively seeking women as Chairs for committees. Many women are over-burdened as there aren’t enough at a high enough level to take the roles.
There need to be more consultations about career interruptions, which are seen to detract from excellence. Yet Barbara McClintock won the Nobel Prize in 1983 for work completed in 1931. She discovered the mechanism by which genes change position on the chromosome. She showed that genetic transposition in corn plants could be seen as colour changes in the corn seeds. The mechanism in plants was later proven to occur in humans. McClintock had to overcome a lot of challenges. She met social adversity in the University of Missouri and finally took an appointment at the Carnegie Instituteat Cold Spring Harbor where she stayed.
She never had tenure and published very few papers.
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Bio: Professor Margaret Sheil is currently CEO of the Australian Research Council, appointed in August 2007. Professor Sheil is a member of the Cooperative Research Centres Committee, the Prime Minister’s Science Innovation and Engineering Council and the National Research Infrastructure Council. She is also a member of the Board of the Australia-India Council and the Advisory Council of the Science Industry Endowment Fund.
From 2002 to 2007 she was Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Research) at the University of Wollongong (UOW). She joined UOW as a lecturer in the Department of Chemistry in 1990, was promoted to Professor of Chemistry in 2000 and appointed Dean of Science at UOW in January 2001. Prior to joining UOW she held positions as a Research Fellow at The Australian National University and the University of Utah, USA. Professor Sheil has a PhD and BSc (Hons) in Chemistry from UNSW. She is a Fellow of the Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering (FTSE) and the Royal Australian Chemical Institute (FRACI).
