CenSoC Seminar Series 2012
Women in Research: Challenges, Opportunities and Insights

Amanda S. Barnard, CSIRO Materials Science & Engineering

A career in research is demanding, and not all higher degree graduates choose this path.  Those that do typically enjoy wonderful travel opportunities, the excitement of discovery and an enduring legacy of published works.  Currently the gender balance in at the graduate level is good, even in traditionally male dominated areas such as science. However, by mid-career a serious gender gap starts to appear, and the disparity worsens at more senior research levels.  Particularly in the fields of science and engineering, women are leaving research in droves.  This is potentially disastrous since maintaining gender equality is an important goal for any organisation.  A failure to attract and retain female researchers means that half of the brightest minds, half of the inspirational leaders, and half of our future innovators are lost to us.   In addition to this, half of the money that our country invests in skills training and education will never yield a return.  I have observed this trend during my own career, and even considered leaving research myself.

In this presentation I will begin by introducing my own career in research, to date, along with some of the challenges I have faced and the opportunities I have benefited from.  We will then look more broadly at the issues faced by women in research, and see how my career compares to others in related fields.  We will conclude the presentation by delving deeper into these issues, and using a Live Simulator to explore how different occupational factors affect the increase/decrease in numbers of minorities in the workplace.  This provides a fascinating insight to how different types of attrition, biases and behaviours influence the ratio of men and women, from graduation to retirement.  The audience will be invited to interact with the Live Simulator to see what we could do, and what we should do, to retain one of our greatest investments in the research and innovation landscape – our women.

Dr. Amanda Barnard is an Australian Research Council Queen Elizabeth II Fellow and the leader of the Virtual Nanoscience Laboratory at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO).  She received her Ph.D. (Physics) in 2003, from which she went on to a 2 year position as a Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellow in the Center for Nanoscale Materials at Argonne National Laboratory (USA).   This was followed by 3 years in the prestigious senior research position as Violette & Samuel Glasstone Fellow at the University of Oxford (UK) with an Extraordinary Research Fellowship at The Queen's College (Oxford). For her work she has recently won the 2009 Young Scientist Prize in Computational Physics from the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics, the 2009 Mercedes Benz Environmental Research Award, the 2009 Malcolm McIntosh Award from the Prime Minister of Australia for the Physical Scientist of the Year, the 2010 Frederick White Prize from the Australian Academy of Sciences, the 2010 Distinguished Lecturer Award from the IEEE South Australia, and the 2010 Eureka Prize for Scientific Research.

* Please note Lunch will be provided from 1 pm, so please RSVP to censoc@uts.edu.au