INDUSTRY & RESEARCH
DR ZOE
BAINBRIDGE
DR ALIZE
FERRARI
ENVIRONMENTAL
PSYCHIATRIC
SCIENCE AND
EPIDEMIOLOGY
MANAGEMENT
campusreview.com.au
DR UTE
KNOCH
APPLIED
LINGUISTICS
PROFESSOR
EMMA KOWAL
DR DELPHINE
LANNUZEL
CULTURAL
CHEMICAL AND
AND MEDICAL
BIOLOGICAL
ANTHROPOLOGY OCEANOGRAPHY
DR ANNIE
LAU
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A winner’s take on equity
If women are to have equal opportunity in
research, caring responsibilities must receive
adequate support and the stigma of flexible
work arrangements must be banished.
Emma Kowal interviewed by James Wells
T
he inaugural Women in Research Citation Awards were
presented in October at the Australian National University,
honouring the top dozen early- to mid-career Australian
women researchers.
The list was compiled by Clarivate Analytics, formerly the
intellectual property and science branch of multinational media
and information firm Thomson Reuters. It sourced 977,500
research papers with at least one author affiliated with an
Australian organisation. Only authors who started publishing
papers after 2004, and who have published at least five papers
since, were considered. The data was analysed to determine the
dozen winners.
Award-winner professor Emma Kowal is a Deakin University
anthropologist who submitted her PhD when her daughter was
7 months old. She says building an academic career while being
a young mother is challenging and workplace settings can and
should be adjusted to help women like herself.
“We know that women are leaving academia in droves in the
postdoctoral years,” Kowal says. “This is a terrible waste of talent
and a brain drain [that] we can do a lot to address. Letting women
work means allowing research funds to cover childcare [when
women are] in the field or attending conferences. It means
providing appropriate and convenient facilities for breastfeeding
12
and pumping. It means flexibility to work from home and virtual
participation in meetings.
“Only when we make it easier for women to combine work and
parenting can we know that our research workforce is the best out
country can have,” she concludes.
Kowal sits down with Campus Review to discuss why these kinds
of awards are important for women in academia and the work she
feels still needs to be done to provide greater support for women
balancing academic careers with family responsibilities.
CR: You’ve said that being a mum and an academic forced you to be
particularly productive and efficient. What workplace settings do
you think could change to help make women’s experiences in the
academy easier?
EK: Funding carers to come with women who have young children,
to conferences and field work, so that in those crucial early years,
women’s momentum in their research careers isn’t affected.
Providing convenient and comfortable facilities for breastfeeding
and pumping is important. Having good ways to recognise
research outputs in relation to opportunity. This is a difficult area,
to judge how parenting has affected research output, but there is a
lot more we can do nationally to make sure we are being fair and
recognising achievements.
Have you been able to quantify or estimate how motherhood
affected your research output?
It’s hard to answer that in the hypothetical because I don’t know
what my research output would have been if I hadn’t had my
two children. Certainly, it’s been a tremendous juggling act and
there are certainly a lot of travel opportunities that I haven’t
taken advantage of, and certainly travel continues to be a real