VIDEO
Women In STEMM - Then and Now
In celebration of International Women's Day, RMIT Physics lecturer Gaile Iles and high school student Casey talk about how far women have come in STEMM.
Women In STEMM - Then and Now
AUDIO: Ambient Music
VISUAL: RMIT Logo appear and then reveals shots of the two stars of the video. Casey, a high school student who is interested in Science and Technology is introduced. Next, Gail, a Physics lecturer at RMIT is introduced. The two sit down for an in conversation style video in a studio, which cuts back and forth between the two with no other visuals.
AUDIO:
CAMERA CREW SPEAKS: All right, and rolling.
CASEY SPEAKS: What STEMM-related opportunities were available to you when you were my age?
GAIL SPEAKS: There was never anybody who said, "Oh, you can't do physics. You're are a girl." I noticed that there was something not quite as I expected when I took the subjects between 16 and 18 because my class was full of boys, and there were two girl.
CASEY SPEAKS: Oh, really?
Gail: That was the first time that I noticed, oh, it's not even numbers as it had been prior to that. With jobs, if I wanted to go any higher, I soon realised that there were not many women in those roles, so there were probably lots of messages to my unconscious mind at that time that I could do it, but only to a certain level.
CASEY SPEAKS: Looking at your experience and industry, what changes have you seen, if any?
GAIL SPEAKS: There's more women.
CASEY SPEAKS: Yeah.
GAIL SPEAKS: There's more women that I'm shoulder to shoulder with. There are more women in management positions, so I can look up and see, "Ah, I can get there." In a lot of the outreach that I've done, I've spoken with school-age children and, particularly, girls, and some have said that they've been under a lot of pressure from their female friends not to study STEMM subjects because they're not cool or it's not what-
CASEY SPEAKS: Oh, really?
GAIL SPEAKS: It's not what girls do. Have you experienced any of that at school or with your friends?
CASEY SPEAKS: I do have a good group of friends, and I feel a lot of them, too, are interested in the sciences, but ...
GAIL SPEAKS: Great.
CASEY SPEAKS: ... a fair ... a lot of them also have other interests, too, but it doesn't really matter because everything is ... whatever you want to do. I guess something else I'd love to ask is what are you excited about for the future?
GAIL SPEAKS: Last year, I was appointed in the department of physics, and I was the first woman, the first academic female in 2017, and these things, these statistics still exists in many places around the world. There are still conferences with all-male speaker lineups. These are the things I want to change, and the more women I have coming up through the ranks, the more choice I'll have.
What advice do you have for me when I'm talking to 16-year-old girls about encouraging them to go into STEMM subjects?
CASEY SPEAKS: Sharing your experiences, especially how you began. That's always ...
GAIL SPEAKS: Okay.
CASEY SPEAKS: That's something that I always found very valuable especially when I was in America and I heard all these amazing people talking. They talked about their life journeys from like the very beginning. They basically talked about those deciding moments ...
GAIL SPEAKS: Okay.
CASEY SPEAKS: ... that really kicked them off into whatever path they went into and just how they ... yeah, the opportunities and how they really grabbed a hold of those opportunities, and I think touching on the mentoring part, I think that is something. It's a very generous act and it's very, very helpful to young girls.
GAIL SPEAKS: Is it your plan to go to university?
CASEY SPEAKS: I think I will be a lifelong learner, so university definitely seems like the place to go, and I guess we'll see where it goes from there.
GAIL SPEAKS: Are you thinking of taking a STEMM subject?
CASEY SPEAKS: Definitely. I think STEMM is where you get the answers and where you find more questions, and it's just ... I think it's a very fulfilling place to be, so I would like to have a career in that.
GAIL SPEAKS: Great. You're really great to have you on board.
CASEY SPEAKS: Thank you.
AUDIO: Ambient music fades
VISUAL: RMIT logo appears
End transcript
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