When the public charitable trust, the Invergowrie Foundation, was established in 1992, its primary focus was clear: to advance the education of girls and women within Victoria. That vision still guides it today but one recently funded project has the potential to inspire young female school students across the country to pursue a career in STEM.
The Primary + STEM initiative brings together a wide range of resources for teaching STEM and inspiring girls towards STEM careers. Associate Professor Therese Keane and Dr Tanya Linden are the researchers behind the online resource.
By sharing stories through the carefully curated delivery of STEM Storytime aimed at girls in primary schools, the women hope the Primary + STEM site will help teachers motivate young girls to see potential in a future within STEM.
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“Through the resources on Primary + STEM, we hope to share with parents the nuanced nature of the STEM industry sector, and the depth of roles and career opportunities that lie within it,” Associate Professor Keane says.
Best-selling author and former teacher, Vikki Petraitis, was one of the writers involved, and interviewed a number of leading international female scientists about their own pathways into STEM.
“We wanted to cover a range of different STEM women from diverse backgrounds,” Ms Petraitis told The Bursar. “Each of these women’s stories shows that there are so many paths that can lead girls to choose a career in STEM.”
The stories that form the STEM Storytime resource on the site include:
- Chemist – Professor Elizabeth New
- Chief CSIRO scientist – Professor Bronwyn Fox
- Entrepreneur and medical researcher – Dr Dharmica Mistry
- Astrophysicist – Professor Lisa Kewley
- Ecological data scientist (marine science) – Dr Marji Puotinen
- Emeritus Professor Cheryl Praeger
For parents, who play a significant role as influencers of girls’ career choices, the stories on the site have been chosen to show a diverse range of career options beyond traditional conceptualisations of STEM (e.g. scientist, engineer, and mathematician).
Teachers who need the pedagogical knowledge, skills, resources, and support to provide students with creative engagement with STEM subjects can access a curated selection of knowledge and activities for teaching STEM to primary school children in creative ways.
In February this year, leading female scientists met to discuss the joys and challenges of working and studying in STEM at a forum held at Parliament House on the International Day of Women and Girls in Science,
The event canvassed women’s participation in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) and explored issues within the sector, including the gender disparities impacting STEM, the barriers to leadership and the ways Victoria’s education system can evolve to further foster interest for the sciences in young girls.
In a media report at the time, Professor Madhu Bhaskaran, a research leader at RMIT University, said the job of addressing gender disparity shouldn’t ‘rest on the shoulders of women’.
“I know we’re fighting for representation, and we’re fighting to be on the right tables and for the right decisions to be made, but this is a people’s problem. It is not a women’s problem,’ she said.
The good news is, she said, that STEM is already seeing the positive impact of cultural change.
“That gives the whole sector the hope that it is possible – if they can do it, we can do it,” she said.
By creating the STEM Storytime collection of inspirational short stories about women who turned their childhood passions into STEM careers, writer Ms Petraitis says it is another step in the right direction.
“The recurring sentiment in all the stories was that a career in STEM comes from a base of curiosity. If you are curious about the world and how things work, this is where it starts,” she says. “No learning or experience is ever wasted. Instead, it all forms building blocks from which to learn more.”
