Clare O'Neil (Hotham, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That this House:

(1) acknowledges the critical role that women have played in advancing Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) in Australia;

(2) notes that despite this, women remain largely underrepresented in STEM disciplines in Australia's schools and universities;

(3) recognises the social and economic benefits of advancing men and women equally through STEM;

(4) supports the need to encourage girls to take an interest in STEM from an early age through greater exposure to, and advancement of, science disciplines in school; and

(5) encourages policies that will enable women and girls to fully realise their potential through STEM at school and university.

It is with huge pride that I begin my remarks by noting that Australian women have some incredible and proud achievements and an incredible and proud history of dominating in the fields of science, technology, engineering and maths. We all know names like Professor Fiona Wood, who invented spray-on skin and continues to do incredible work with burns victims all over the world; Elizabeth Blackburn, the Nobel Prize winning scientist and I think the only Tasmanian to win a Nobel Prize so far; and Dr Marguerite Evans-Galea, the co-founder of Women in Science Australia and an award-winning biomedical researcher at the Murdoch Childrens Research Institute. Amongst the younger cohort, I am so pleased to note the achievements of Marita Cheng, our 2012 Young Australian of the Year and the founder of Robogals, and Yassmin Abdel-Magied, a mechanical engineer, founder of Youth Without Borders and the 2015 Queensland Young Australian of the Year. All of these women are incredible achievers who are operating at the global heights of their professions.

While it is critical to celebrate their success, we must also be frank that these remarkable achievements unfortunately do not reflect the share of women in their professions overall. A terrifying statistic, just to get started, is that just 10 per cent of senior science academics in Australia's universities and research institutes are Australian women. I will share some other numbers with the House that bring some of the issues that we are discussing today to light. Of all the Australians today who are working in STEM, less than a third of them are Australian women, and this figure is as low as 14 per cent when we look at the engineering profession. The underrepresentation of women at a professional level comes right back to our education system. We know that in our universities just one in five engineering students are women and 14 per cent of information technology enrolments are women. When we get to our school system, we see where this problem begins. The number of women at the higher levels of our senior schools taking advanced mathematics is about half what it is for young men, and just 1.5 per cent of Australian girls are completing the three key STEM courses, which are advanced maths, physics and chemistry, at their year 12 level. What is even more worrying is that when we look at these numbers we see that they are actually getting worse over time and not better. Just one fact: the share of young women in year 12 who studied physics fell by a third between 1992 and 2009.

These numbers should be incredibly concerning to every person in this country. They should be worrying to us because we have very clear evidence here that the best and brightest young Australians are not breaking through in these key professions in science, technology, engineering and maths. When we see women get into these professions, we see them make incredible breakthroughs. Think of all the inventions, the patents, the new medicines and the breakthrough technologies that could have been invented by fantastic, high-achieving Australian women who are not being represented in these professions today.

There is a big human capital argument and a big economic argument here, but I want the parliament to address this issue because I believe it is a fundamental social justice issue when we look to the decades ahead. One of the things that we know about the way in which our labour market is changing—and it is changing very rapidly—is that people who have these qualifications are shooting to the top of the labour market, and they are doing better and better year by year. We know that we see spectacular jobs growth in the areas of our economy that require STEM qualifications. There are many factors. Sometimes people talk about three times as much job growth in STEM professions as in non-STEM professions. What we are seeing here with these facts is that we are creating a situation where the best, highest-paying and most senior roles in our society are ones where women are inevitably going to be dramatically less represented, and I believe that the underrepresentation of women in STEM is one of the top feminist issues of our time.

Labor is the only party in Australia that is talking about this problem and that has a plan to address it. I am so proud when I look at the policy announcement that Labor has made on this front so far. What the Leader of the Opposition has talked about is wiping out the student debt for 100,000 young people who graduate with these qualifications, introducing 25,000 teacher scholarships, and increasing the number of students completing their STEM studies by 20,000 graduates a year from 2020. All of these policies will be implemented with a particular focus on bringing more women into these professions, where they belong.

We have to address this problem. If we allow it to continue, we will pay a hugely heavy toll. (Time expired)

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