Despite how far we may have come in terms of gender equality, there’s still a super pronounced lack of female representation in the hard sciences which are proving pretty tricky to combat.
In an effort to tackle this plan head on, the University of Melbourne will be adding 3 jobs in the School of Mathematics and Statistics open exclusively to women.
Professor Aleks Owczarek, the head of the school, says that it’s an attempt to to promote change:
“We clearly have an issue with attracting female applicants appropriately to our workforce. So this is an agenda to attempt to address that.”
The jobs will be in pure maths, applied maths and stats, which all seem like different ways of saying “the jobs are in maths”. The roles will vary in level based on the candidate’s experience.
The Associate Professor of Mathematics at the University of South Australia, Lesley Ward, says the gender skewing becomes more pronounced the higher level the role:
“At the first academic rank of associate lecturer it’s still only 30 per cent women … at the highest rank, of professor, it’s 9 per cent women, according to the most recent data we have from 2014.”
The jobs are advertised under the Victorian Equal Opportunity Act, which allows acts that may seem obviously discriminatory if they’re in the interest of encouraging overall equality.
Some people reckon the divide is because we don’t encourage girls and young women to participate in the hard sciences and hobbies that encourage maths, some people reckon women naturally aren’t as good at maths (those people are dicks).
Source: The ABC.
