Myth vs reality: women and girls' timidity or real risk taking?

Australia's Minister for Women  wants to encourage more women into engineering, science and technology. This coincides with the release, by the UK Office for Standards in Education, Children's Services and Skills (Ofsted), of its report on girls' educational outcomes and career aspirations. Painting a bleak picture of female students' inability to seize opportunities by stepping outside conventional boundaries, the findings have their parallel in Australia. As in the United Kingdom, in Australia myth clouds the terrain, although ready to hand lies evidence disputing the stereotypes and dispelling notions of female conformity.

Based in the research undertaken in primary and secondary schools (co-ed and all-girls) and educational colleges, Girls' Career Aspirations found:

• At age 16, young women's educational achievements exceed those of boys, with proportionately more girls than boys continuing education to degree level;

• As to careers and pay rates, such early success does not translate into advantages commensurate with job and income outcomes for young men, or with young women's own achievements;

• Women remain less likely than men to enter and sustain employment in particular sectors such as science, engineering and technology.

There can be little argument with these findings, nor with their replication on the Australian educational and paidwork scene. Nor is it likely that Australian research would dispute the report's confirmation of schoolgirls and students of all ages knowing that conventions apply to 'girls' jobs' and 'boys' jobs'.

Ofsted's report found further that despite the existing conventions, by secondary school the students understood that according to theory they could, if they wished, choose a job in any field, whether traditionally male or female. Pursuit of a career challenging gender stereotypes was seen by the vast majority of these girls and young women as open to them – so long as such a career was of sufficient interest. Yet this awareness 'did not always translate into practice':

Course and career choices made by the girls and young women, in the schools and colleges visited, were predominantly stereotypical and mirrored the national picture of take-up of courses.

A principal finding was that careers education was 'weak'. This meant 'making informed choice of courses and careers was difficult' for the students. A consequence of the paucity of strongly informative careers advice was that, in turn, girls and young women gained a 'limited knowledge and understanding of how their choices [would] influence their future pay and progression'. Further, despite a slightly higher level of such knowledge and understanding for those from all-girls' schools, ultimately the outcomes were little different for both cohorts. A lack of confidence, drive and ambition on the part of girls and young women was said to inhibit their capacity to take risks.

It is here that questions arise. Is the answer too glib, too ready to locate in girls and women themselves the problem of disparity in jobs, wage and salary levels, entry into non-traditional fields and promotion into leadership roles? In suggesting that to compete on an equal level with boys and men less qualified educationally and intellectually, girls and women need to be 'fixed' or to 'fix' themselves, or be 'mentored' by being put in touch with professionals in diverse fields, do the findings avoid confronting what truly lies beneath the workplace conundrum of men in greater numbers in high and higher places, still dominating 'male' careers, leaving behind the women who surpassed them in brainpower at school and college?

The finding as to risk-taking – or a purported fear of risk-taking - on the part of girls and young women demands further analysis. It conforms too readily to stereotypical notions of man, the hunter – out in the wild, challenging the environment, exploring the world and defending the home with ingenuity and daring, whilst woman-as-homebody remains passively at the hearth, hardly daring to venture beyond the potato patch or, at most, outside the hen house or past the paddy fields. Rather, any open review of women's engagement in the world of paidwork, untrammeled by preconceived ideas of what constitutes risk, what risks are confronted and what risks are dealt with casts the proposition into doubt. In myriad ways, women are the great risk-takers. Furthermore, and just as confounding, the risk-taking often involves women who have entered traditional 'women's jobs' or 'women's fields'.

When looked at without blinkers, the evidence puts paid to the proposition that it is girls and women who limit their own horizons through timidity, that they perform stereotypically in taking on careers in traditional fields, or that they simply lack drive or ambition. Indeed, it may well be in those traditional fields that women are more likely to engage in risk-taking, to challenge stereotypes, and to embrace risk not only with vigour, but with courage unmatched.

Val Buswell took up a conventional role in sales, working in a large department store. Going on a road trip during her annual holidays, she bought up a range of stock, took it with her, and approached stores along the way. Her success led her into independent selling, a risky move for someone who, up to that time, had been secure in a modestly well-paid position where she could have remained, working her way into supervisory roles and higher pay. Hence, despite beginning conventionally, risk-taking led her into unconventional waters.

Louise Liddy Corpus grew up on a mission near Darwin. She went to work at a bank with the aim of becoming the first Indigenous Australian teller, but was 'tucked away in the clearing branch'. She gained promotions and went into a higher paid position in the post office, then spent her time between Sydney and Darwin in a variety of banking and postal services posts. When visiting Townsville, she took yet another risk, approaching the ABC to ask for an on-air job. She got it, fronting a drive-time programme and interviewing federal and state politicians and others in the public eye. It was the capacity to be brave, to take risks, that made her challenge the low expectations held out for her and to which she was expected to conform.

Kath Balfour went into teaching – a profession convention sees as particularly suited to women. Teaching art led her directly into a pattern of risk-taking that began with her 'taking off' to Mexico to enhance her aesthetic skills in pottery-making. She travelled Latin America, then the Middle-East and India, returning to Australia to set-up her own pottery studio. Continuing to teach, ultimately she became head of a TAFE College art department. She then risked all by enrolling in law at Murdoch University so that, on top of her art and teaching qualifications, she entered legal practice.

Working a series of itinerant jobs, Jill Gallagher moved from factory work to fish and chip shop sales to picking beans. Impecunious conditions at home meant she left school early to assist her family by bringing in a wage. Later, risking humiliation and rejection, but with huge (and justified) confidence, she decided 'there must be more to life than making fibreglass baths' – she had a factory job at the time – and approached the Museum of Victoria. Taken on as a trainee, she then enrolled in an archeology degree at university. She gained a post at the Victorian Archeology Survey – a consequence of being able to place herself 'on the line' by having the courage to believe in herself and her abilities.

At age 15, with her family, Lariane Fonseca migrated to Australia from India. Schooling and a desire to be independent led her into nursing. This 'female' career choice saw her working in a Melbourne hospital, earning sufficient to make her own living arrangements. Then, suffering a back-injury that had her fighting to become mobile once more, she was forced to consider new career options. No 'easy' or 'female' route for her: she took a risk – enrolling in a newly developed information technology course at university. Becoming a senior programmer and analyst, she travelled to London to assist in setting-up a data centre for a bank in 'The City'.

Janine Haines began conventionally too. She wanted to be a teacher, trained as one, and taught in South Australian schools. Then, a risk-taker exemplar, she went to work in a politician's office, eventually took over his role as the politician, and became a Senator then Leader of the Australian Democrats. After holding the post for some years, she again risked security, comfort and a substantial parliamentary pension by retiring from the Senate to stand for the House of Representatives – an election she lost. Without grumbling, groaning, or berating the electorate, she went with grace into independent consulting – simultaneously writing a book on the challenges confronting women in a patriarchal world.

Each of these women – anglo-Australians, minority ethnic background, and Indigenous Australians – may have taken paths conventional for women, at least at the beginning of their paidwork careers. Yet this work precipitated them into taking risks, challenging the stereotypes by entering less conformist or unconventional roles. They are certainly not alone in this: huge numbers of women continue to enter nursing, teaching, librarianship, service and secretarial or clerical work – all seen as 'suitable for a woman', and at which they perform with ability and commitment. Subsequently, significant numbers move into non-traditional areas, taking with them the skills learned in their earlier roles and fields of industry. For women, audacity in taking risks is not the problem.

What inhibits women's advancement is not women's skills, capacities, abilities or courage. All are essential to women's survival – as Lariane Fonseca eloquently avers:

… the challenge of work in an essential male arena took its toll. Men sought to trivialise my existence and disregard my presence, often totally … Sexual harassment, verbal abuse, and racist and sexist jokes were part of everyday life. I attempted to maintain a non-hierarchical mode of operation with a devolution of power in leadership. My aim was to share knowledge and responsibility with my co-workers. This was abused and ridiculed; as far as most were concerned, what I needed was a 'good man'.

Confronted with a culture that too often proves endemic, what do women do? For Lariane Fonseca, 'devastated, frustrated by the failure of [her] efforts', the initial solution was to 'seek refuge in another survival strategy,' becoming 'one of the boys':

I drank with them, defeated them at snooker, laughed at their jokes. Suprisingly, it worked. They paid attention, met their responsibilities – yet all the while I squirmed inside. How could I prostitute all I had come to believe in as worth fighting for? I knew then I had to get out: if male power was needed to survive, I certainly did not need it.

Lariane Fonesca took yet more risks: left the job, travelled the world – Europe, Africa, Asia, including three months with a Kurdish tribe – then, landing back in London, enrolled in a Master's degree.

So – the ball is back in Ofsted's court and, similarly, all those Australian initiators and holders of inquiries, writers of reports, researchers into what is seen as 'the woman problem' in the world of paid employment (women's lesser earnings in and 'lesser commitment to'), management (lack of women in) and board positions ('failure of women' to be appointed to). For too long, women have striven to achieve through education, university and trade qualifications, gaining experience and expertise in a range of fields and endeavours. For too long, women have taken up the problem as one for which they are responsible: the 'wrong' qualifications, 'insufficient' experience, the 'wrong' leadership and managerial skills, the inability to deal with sexual harassment and bullying, whether top down or bottom up.

It is time for clarity and precision about where the problem lies. Ofsted and its Australian equivalents need to put the real problem in writing. More, they need to address it with more than words: not only, now, with action, but with effective action placing the onus where rightly it should lie.

Now that 'culture' is at last in the public eye in respect of the Australian Defence Force (ADF) let it be confronted full-on in every institution, public and private, that is founded on the false principle that whatever women's qualifications, ability, experience, skills and expertise, room 'at the top', wages and salaries commensurate with performance, and careers spread across the whole spectrum of industry are no place for a women.