Ivory Towers and Glass Ceilings: Women in Non-traditional Fields
When a Fair Chance for All was published in 1990 women comprised 51 % of all higher education students but only 34 % of higher degree students. In 2015 women constitute a majority of undergraduate and higher degree research students. Women’s growing parti
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Ivory Towers and Glass Ceilings: Women in Non-traditional Fields Sharon Bell
Introduction Globally we have seen unprecedented growth in women’s participation in higher education over the past four decades. The report on Women in Higher Education under United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s Global Education Digest (United Nations Educational and Scientific and Cultural Organization UNESCO 2012) notes that the number of female students in tertiary education has grown almost twice as fast as men, largely reflecting ‘changing values and attitudes related to the role and aspirations of women in society that are the legacy of social change and the feminist movements which emerged globally in the 1960s and 70s’. In Australia these changes were reflected in improved retention rates of young females to Year 12 of schooling and increased rates of transition from Year 12 to higher education, documented from 1980 through the Longitudinal Surveys of Australian Youth (Long et al. 1999, p. 1). It is also well documented that these global social changes were reflected in and enhanced by the policy and legislative environment. In 1984 Australia passed the Sex Discrimination Act and in 1986 the Australian Government passed the Affirmative Action (Equal Employment Opportunity for Women) Act. At the individual state level legalisation covering equality and diversity was introduced at different times following the NSW Anti-Discrimination Act of 1977. Three states introduced Equal Opportunity Acts in 1984 (Victoria, South Australia and Western Australia). Data on the gender composition of university staff were first published in 1985 (Carrington and Pratt 2003, p. 4).
S. Bell (*) Office of the Vice Chancellor, Charles Darwin University, Darwin, NT, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Science+Business Media Singapore 2016 A. Harvey et al. (eds.), Student Equity in Australian Higher Education, DOI 10.1007/978-981-10-0315-8_7
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Together with the government’s national agenda for women A Say, A Choice, a Fair Go (1988) these were important precursors to A Fair Chance for All (Department of Education, Employment & Training (DEET), 1990), which explicitly recognised the importance of the productivity as well as the equity agenda for women: Women are under-represented in most of the Government’s key priority areas for economic development. In terms of national goals, women represent a pool of untapped potential. In addition, although women are equally represented in the current student population, their under-representation in the past has meant that there are still many older women in the community who have not had the opportunity to undertake (sic) in higher education. A more equal balance between the sexes in higher education will also help redress inequality in employment for women. Women’s participation in the workforce will be directed away from areas of shrinking employment and into areas of skills shortage. This will help break down the present sex-segregation of the labou
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