TRANSCRIPT
Like many areas of STEM, women's representation in the field of astronomy remains historically low.
Over the past five years, an Australian company has made it their mission to achieve gender parity, with 50 per cent of its workforce now identifying as female.
The Australian Research Council Centre for All Sky Astrophysics in 3 Dimensions, or ASTRO 3D, is a $40 million research centre for excellence funded by the government, operating for a period of seven years until June 2024.
Researchers at the centre seek to understand the evolution of light, matter and the elements - from the Big Bang to the present.
ASTRO 3D's chief operating officer Ingrid McCarthy says bridging the gender gap has been a goal of theirs since the centre's inception in 2017.
"I know initially when Lisa [Kewley] first broached the idea of achieving this within the lifetime of the centre, it was ... some eyebrows raised on whether it could be achieved."
Initially, 38 per cent of ASTRO 3D employees were women.
As of January 2023, women make up 50 per cent at all levels of academia.
To achieve this, the centre set diversity targets with regular monitoring, selecting a diverse set of team leaders and requiring in-person diversity training for all members of the organisation.
Ms McCarthy says these initiatives were followed up by specific training, including identifying unconscious bias in hiring practices.
"Now, we all have it. We all have these unconscious biases in who we think the best person for a job is going to be. And so by making that explicit and doing in-person training for all centre members, and especially people who are going to be on selection committees picking our next generation of researchers, bringing those biases to front-of-mind, becoming aware of them, and making sure that we're not bringing our own personal biases into decision-making is really, really important."
ASTRO 3D has since published a paper in Nature Astronomy, detailing their evidence-based approach, which draws on sociology and psychology to recruit and retain women in the field.
The centre's postdoctoral selection panels comprised 50 per cent women, with a mandate for 50 per cent of shortlisted candidates to be women, too.
Ms McCarthy says it's helped foster a more positive culture.
"Interestingly, what we found is, once we have over 40 per cent of women leading research teams... then what we found was PhD students who can choose what research they want to do and who they want to work with, once we had women-led teams, women were much more likely to nominate themselves to do a PhD in that team."
Nalini Joshi is a professor of mathematics at the University of Sydney.
At 65 years old, she says she has seen a shift in the number of women joining her field.
"I've lived a long time (laughs), so I can tell you that when I was younger I don't think I had any role models except the ones I read about in books. And they were long gone by the time I became an undergraduate student in mathematics. When I was an undergraduate I think there was only one lecturer who was a woman in the whole school. The others were called tutors, they were somehow in lesser positions, if you know what I mean."
Professor Joshi says she believes there's more awareness of inequity and the value of diversity in academia today.
And while she's noticed more women pursuing mathematics at entry-level, she says that increase hasn't translated into long-term change at the top level.
"It's actually really discouraging because a lot of people think that the job is done if you attract more women at the entry-level, or more women into studying mathematics. But they forget, or they elect not to see, that there are much more significant, deep undertones that lead to people being pushed out again, even if they are entering in larger numbers."
ASTRO 3D's seven-year funding will end in June of next year.
But the centre's Ingrid McCarthy says many of the women employed will continue to work in academia and other areas of the industry beyond that.
"They call it a leaky pipeline. Women are much more likely not to make it to the senior levels of academia because of systemic problems. So, we make sure that we have a really positive culture in ASTRO 3D. We have things as well as the hiring guidelines, we have inclusive conference guidelines, so women and neurodiverse people - all people - can come along and they're comfortable being their true selves."
Professor Stuart Wyithe is the director of the Research School for Astronomy and Astrophysics at the Australian National University.
He says he hopes ASTRO 3D's paper leaves a legacy for other research centres across Australia.
"I hope the paper raises awareness that this has been done in an area that's traditionally been regarded as one where it was a very long-term goal to achieve gender equity. So having, I think, the importance of the paper is it's been done in a short time-frame with a concerted effort and it documents some of activities that we've taking to do that. But I think underpinning that is a lot of resource that's on the ground, resource that can be applied directly to centres that are existing, or ones that will form in the future, or indeed research centres that are more ongoing in university centres or elsewhere."
