Amanda Rishworth (Kingston, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Health) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

This week, celebrated right across our campuses, is Bluestocking Week—an important time to acknowledge and celebrate the participation and contribution that women have made to higher education in Australia and also, importantly, to look at the barriers that still exist for women at universities and right across our country. There are a number of areas where women are still fighting to be equally represented. One of those areas in particular is the STEM disciplines. To give an example, in engineering and related technologies women comprise a mere 20 per cent of university enrolments. They are just 14 per cent of information technology enrolments.

Labor has a plan to boost participation of women in higher education, particularly in the STEM disciplines. Importantly, a Shorten Labor government will boost women's participation in STEM by committing to 20,000 STEM award degrees every year for five years, with a target of encouraging women to participate. This is in stark contrast to the Liberal Party's plan. Their only plan for higher education is to make cuts to our universities and foist $100,000 degrees on students. This will not improve women's participation in higher education. It will only take us backwards. In this Bluestocking Week I thank the NUS and the NTEU for keeping a focus on women's participation in higher education.