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INDUSTRY & RESEARCH little girl on a farm with a Mary Robinson scrapbook is kind of laughable but it helped, it really helped – otherwise I would never have studied law.”
Recently named amongst the Australian Financial Review and Westpac ' s Australia’ s 100 Women of Influence 2014, Harris Rimmer is director of studies at ANU’ s Asia Pacific College of Diplomacy. But whilst she has forged her own rich and rewarding career in an arena she loves, her need for exemplars such as Robinson highlights both the real and artificial barriers that can otherwise hold back or even – as in her case – blinker young women from pursuing their interests as vocational possibilities.
And whilst she holds no regrets, she concedes that with a different outlook, her career direction may have been vastly different.
“ I grew up in Coonabarabran, which is a very small town in NSW with a population of 3000. It’ s at the foot of the Siding Spring Observatory, to which I went very often,” she says.“ I was fascinated with astronomy … but there were no female astronomers whom I met or saw and it never even occurred to me that was a career I could take. I was living under the biggest telescope in the Southern Hemisphere and it never even occurred to me that could be something for me.”
BLINKERED OR BARRED Sandra Capra, who commenced her university studies in 1965, was told in no uncertain terms that women had no place in the profession she had initially hoped to pursue.
“ I wanted to be a fisheries biologist,” says Capra, now a professor of nutrition at the University of Queensland’ s school of human movement studies.“ I was actively pursuing that but they said fairly plainly,‘ Well, we don’ t have women’,” she recalls.“ I had a friend at university who wanted to be a geologist, and they failed her at geology until she got the message – she couldn’ t graduate in geology because again the attitude was,‘ We don’ t have women geologists.’ I don’ t think people understand that’ s what it was like but it’ s true.”
Capra largely credits the networks she was able to help build with other similarly determined women working in nutrition over the years for the progress she and her female colleagues made in slowly seizing control of their profession’ s direction.“ Three of us across the country supported each other in getting our doctorates, getting promotions, getting in control of nutrition degrees and then stepping up into leadership roles – but it has been quite challenging,” she says.
And whilst things have changed substantially since the’ 60s, she believed lists of influential women – such as the AFR’ s, on which she was also included this year along with about a dozen other academics – remain important.
Indeed, her youngest daughter, now an academic herself, has reported encountering lingering gender-related challenges in her career in aeronautical engineering – a field Capra says remains heavily male dominated.
“ Nowadays, on the whole though, academia is very positive for professional development for women in leadership programs and it’ s a very supportive environment so it’ s not nearly as difficult – but to do well you have to put in about 30 hours a day and that’ s the trouble,” she says.“ So if you’ ve got a family or if you’ ve got responsibilities, many things become difficult and in general it can be difficult for women at certain times in their life.”
AN INDIGENOUS PERSPECTIVE Charles Sturt University’ s Faye McMillan – also one of Australia’ s 100 Women of Influence this year – is another who believes she has benefited from the progress made towards bridging the gender gap facing professional women.
Since graduating as Australia’ s first Aboriginal pharmacist in 2001, McMillan says she has seen marked changes in the number of women stepping into senior leadership roles in academia at various levels – all the way up to vice-chancellor roles.
“ I moved into pharmacy, a profession that had started to move away from being a very male-dominated area to something that women were seeing – particularly with community pharmacy and its opening hours, potential for job sharing and other things family-oriented people seek – as a viable career.
“ So that landscape is slowly changing but in lots of other organisations the make-up of men and women in those more senior roles is still disproportionate,” she says.
McMillan is now chair of Indigenous Allied Health Australia and is the director of the Djirrawang( bachelor of health science – mental health) program at CSU.
She says she cannot recall having perceived gender-based limitations on her professional aspirations. Her family, she says, has always been inspirational through their support of whatever goals she set out to achieve – but has also been helpful in reminding her how hard she would need to work.
As an Indigenous Australian she says, the pressures to do well are sometimes magnified.
“ There is the notion for Indigenous people that there is another set of hurdles for them to overcome in order to engage in educational platforms,” she says.“ When I say educational platforms, I don’ t just mean university, I mean any opportunity where people can better themselves or their circumstances through their learnings – and that’ s not always been something that’ s been afforded to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.
“ So I think it is a thing sometimes that if you’ re going to do something then you have to do it twice as well to gain the recognition because of the unfortunate stereotypes regarding Aboriginal people not always coming up to the same level.”
ACADEMIC PLATFORM For Harris Rimmer, one of the most exciting things about the 2014 Women of Influence list is the strong representation of academics. But whilst she believes it sends a vital and positive message to young women about the possibilities of career academia, she also says efforts to achieve gender equality across the tertiary education sector need to be fast-tracked.
“ Women have been in universities now for a long time but I think the latest research is that if we continue the way we have been, it may take 150 years to get any kind of gender-equity statistics for professors in Australia,” she says.“ To me it’ s most important that academia says to people there are equal numbers of smart men and women.”
In the meantime, perhaps in part to help the process along, she believes people like herself have a responsibility to the generations of young women following in their footsteps.
“ That’ s why I’ m always putting myself out there as much as I can, because I feel like I have a duty to the young girls in Coonabarabran to say,‘ Hey, I was from Coonabarabran and I was probably worse off than you and it all panned out.’ I feel like it ' s really important to tell kids – especially the rural ones – that they can have unlikely careers.” ■
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