Karen Andrews (McPherson, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am delighted to be speaking on this topic as the Assistant Minister for Science, because it is something that falls well within the portfolio of Industry, Innovation and Science, and Science in particular, where I have responsibility. But I am also very keen to talk on this subject because I am an engineer, and at this point of time I am the only female engineer in the Australian parliament. So I think that gives me an opportunity to put a very unique perspective—certainly to provide some background information on STEM but also to talk about what it is like to actually be a female engineer and to address some of the issues that are so important to us going forward.

I would like to start by just putting a little bit of perspective around this issue, and that is to look firstly at the decline in the number of students who are actually taking STEM subjects—so science, technology, engineering and maths, and in particular science and maths subjects—at school. If we compare the number of students in 1992 to 2012—so over a 20-year period—there were 30,800 more students in year 2012 than there were in 1992, but there was a significant decrease in the number of students who were studying science and maths subjects. There were 8,000 fewer physics students, 4,000 fewer chemistry students and 12,000 fewer biology students. So what we can see is that there has been a reduction in the number of students overall who are studying science, technology, engineering and maths, and that is without taking into account the gender issues and the significant changes in the number of women who are studying the science and maths subjects.

The percentage of students who are studying advanced and intermediate maths also declined over that period. I think that is another important thing that we need to be mindful of—that is, that many students who were, for example, capable of doing Maths B and C were taking a different level of maths, Maths A. So that put them in a difficult situation—going into, for example, engineering—when they went on to university because they did not have the high-level maths skills that they needed. They had to move straight into bridging courses.

I understand that this is now somewhat common over a number of subjects as well. For example, with chemistry, students who are not taking chemistry subjects at school and wish to study chemistry when they go on to university have to take bridging courses to enable them to at least catch up in their first year of university. Clearly, that makes it significantly more difficult for those students.

The questions are: why is this concerning and why do we need to be mindful of this? The most important issue for me is that whilst we do not know exactly what the jobs of the future will be, we do know that 75 per cent of those jobs will require skills in science, technology, engineering and maths. It is very clear that we must be doing something to increase the take-up rate.

I want to speak briefly about some of the stats for women, because they are not particularly good. In academia, we see that the more senior the researcher the less likely the researcher is to be a woman. At senior levels, the figure sits around just 17 per cent. Participation rates for women are lower than those of men for all national competitive grants schemes. The proportion of female undergraduate and postgraduate students in STEM fields has barely changed over the past decade. In 2013, when considering domestic enrolment, female students made up 32.4 per cent of undergraduate STEM enrolments and 36.1 per cent of postgraduate STEM enrolments.

What we do know—and I heard the member for Hotham talk about what happens at the university level—is that the critical time for people to take up STEM skills is actually years 5 to 8. That is where we must be targeting. That is where we must be making sure that we engage with these young people, particularly women, and demonstrate to them that there is a real opportunity if they were to continue the interest that they have in maths and science.

I am a very strong advocate of making sure that we start that pipeline early. There are many examples of where we have had very valuable science and maths programs implemented at the very early ages, particularly in Germany. I would encourage those opposite—and, in fact, everyone in the House—to have a look at the German programs to see what we can learn out of them, to make sure that we are starting our students early to understand science, technology, engineering and maths.

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