Blaze e-catalogue - Catalog - Page 15
Blaze: Working Women, Public Leaders
Dr Kanga, who migrated to Australia from India in the late 1970s, faced a similar situation:
When I arrived in Australia the Anti-Discrimination Act had just been passed. But jobs
were still being advertised for engineering under ‘Men and Boys’ in the Sydney Morning
Herald. I was applying for these jobs and it was extraordinarily difficult. I had people say
when I called them up, ‘Are you somebody’s secretary, are you somebody’s sister?’
I said ‘No, I am applying for myself’, and they said ‘Oh, we never knew a woman could
be an engineer.’
Surveyor-General of NSW, Narelle Underwood, has explained how the underrepresentation
of women in some sectors of STEAM constitutes a form of gender-based bias:
There are just over 1000 registered surveyors in NSW at the moment.
Twenty-eight or around 2.7 per cent are women, which is abysmal.
Mrs Underwood, however, believes that advancements in technology which have made
the physical work of surveyors less arduous will result in greater numbers of women entering
the field.
Director and CEO of the Australian Museum, Kim McKay AO has made similar observations:
When I went to my first meeting of the Council of Australian Museum Directors—
twenty-two museums are members—there were four women at the table. Now what’s
wrong with that picture? That’s why I set up the mentoring program with Rose Hiscock,
who then ran the Powerhouse Museum, to actually shift the needle. We now have six
women running museums across Australia, instead of four, but there’s a long way to go.
For Sarah Hynes (1859–1938) the first women scientist—a botanist—employed by the NSW
Government, discrimination on the grounds of sex was antagonistic and targeted. At the
Sydney Technological (Powerhouse) Museum, her superiors described her as ‘an experiment’,
and concluded that her position ‘cannot be filled by a woman’. At the Botanic Gardens, where
she was the sole female and only employee with qualifications in Botanical Science, she was
accused of insubordination, querulous and quarrelsome conduct, neglect and incompetency
and of being ‘more trouble than a hundred men’. Director, Joseph Maiden, described her
conduct as ‘so notorious that she has done untold harm to the cause of the employment
of women in the Public Service’. Hynes was eventually shifted to the Department of Public
Instruction to teach botany, and her superiors found her to be highly competent.
Architect Marion Mahony Griffin (1871–1961) was for many years, invisible. Her husband,
Walter Burley Griffin, was the public face to what is now considered to have been a creative
partnership, which architecture historian Anna Rubbo has described as being ‘nurtured
by different but complementary personal, intellectual and creative strengths, and shared
spiritual beliefs’.
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