Dr Steve Lennon, Chairperson of the National Advisory Council on Innovation;
Prof Lineo Mazwi-Tanga, Chairperson of the SET for Women Committee of NACI;
Prof Krish Bharuth-Ram, Head of NACI
Members of the NACI Council;
Members of the SET for Women Committee;
Distinguished guests
It’s a pleasure to welcome you to this National Advisory Council on Innovation (NACI) symposium on the leadership roles of women in science.
In June this year I went to the TWOWS Fourth General Assembly and International Conference on Women Scientists in a changing world, in Beijing, where I became acutely aware of the challenges faced by women scientists globally.
I’m therefore encouraged to see a Beijing type of gathering by women scientists in South Africa today.
There are a couple of points that I want to highlight this morning.
First, South Africa has done very well in expanding the access of women to education at all levels, but is not training nearly enough women scientists.
This is surprising, because there are more women at university than men.
However, the thing is that women stick to traditional subjects and shy away from science and technology.
In fact, the greatest gender imbalance is in engineering and engineering technology where only one in four students is a woman.
On top of this, we have a major problem. A great number of students don’t graduate.
Nearly 6 in 10 of first-year students who entered university in 2000 had dropped out of the system in four years. Female students constitute more than half of this group. Even more distressing African female students constitute 7 in 10 of this female student group.
So there you have it - more women than men at university, far more men than women in science and technology subjects, and high enrolment undermined by low graduation (too many students drop out).
Last weekend the Sunday Times ran with a story about our future knowledge economy. Its thrust was that our knowledge economy was in peril, because our doctoral graduate numbers were too low.
We are not, it says, going to reach our target of 3,000 PhDs a year in science, engineering and technology by 2018. Why? Because there were only 1,182 PhD graduates in 2008, and only 575 (less than half) were in the SET sector.
Accordingly some academics call the target a ‘tragic fantasy’.
The journalist did not stop there. He went further. Not only were the numbers too low, but half the black PhDs were not even South Africans. They were from other African countries. This was something of a sleight of hand apparently. The data apparently created the “illusion of transformation”.
Now let’s take a closer look at what appears to be a case of academic xenophobia.
This is old news. The Council on Higher Education released these statistics at the beginning of the year.
But more importantly it is our explicit policy to encourage students from the SADDC region and in the rest of Africa to study in South Africa.
While we encourage foreign doctoral candidates here, there is an equal if not larger outflow of South African doctoral candidates abroad. Those figures are not counted by those who argue for academic xenophobia.
But that is not the issue. Instead our major concern at the moment is that we do not have enough supervisors with PhDs in our universities. We are going to tackle this issue and we anticipate being able to announce some funded plans in the near future.
Then, almost all countries that I can think of encourage foreign PhD students.
For example, one in four doctoral candidates in Sweden is a foreigner and this fact is regarded in a positive light by Swedish universities. Why? The answer is because most of them continue to live Sweden after graduation. They want the best candidates and they make it known that foreign students are most welcome. A similar number of foreign doctoral students study in Norway. In fact, foreigners are essential to beef up their numbers in maths, the natural sciences and technological studies.
It is well known that American research universities are world leaders in science and technology. They have long trained cohorts of Indian and Chinese PhD students. While many of these students remain in America, there has been a recent trend for return to their home countries. There, of course, they are not lost to the country where they trained. They play an essential role in global research and development, which is increasingly outsourced to developing countries.
Nonetheless, the crowning point is that there is a global academic culture in which most top scientists no longer live and work in the countries of their birth.
My second point is that we can do better on gender equity in the science and technology sector.
Why do I say this? I say this because gender equity in education and employment is easier to achieve in a post-industrial economy than in an industrial economy.
Industrial occupational structures were divided into “male jobs” and ‘female jobs” with those professions requiring technical skills being largely the preserve of males.
With the growing importance of knowledge-based occupations - the legions of lawyers, doctors, and managerial professionals - women find it easier to fit in.
The services industry is a case in point, where we see more women entering the management professions and occupying high-level positions.
This trend is also more evident in universities and certain sections of the business sector where women in science have achieved leadership positions.
Allow me, now, to touch briefly on the matter that has brought us to this symposium, and that matter is the “Principles and Good Practice Guidelines for enhancing women’s participation in the STI”, in particular in leadership roles.
NACI’s “Good Practice Guidelines”, which I launch today, entail the following three major calls.
The first call is for cross-sectoral principles to underpin gender equality across the SET sector.
By this is meant equal opportunity, commitment to transparency and the attentive mapping of women’s needs and priorities.
You as leaders and senior managers in the STI environment should become champions of gender equity policies in your respective spheres of influence.
These principles call for reviews of gender equity policies in the STI, with respect to recruitment, retention and advancement of women using reliable and valid indicators.
These principles call for a safe and healthy work environment, in particular sensitivity to the effects of hazardous environments on women. They also advocate safety equipment and clothing and provision of appropriate toilet facilities amongst other things.
The second a call is for workplace principles.
Women in the STI experience a range of gender-specific challenges including gender stereotyping, lack of flexibility options for women, unequal remuneration, gender insensitive communication, sexual harassment and lack of mentorship.
Through these guidelines I would like to see a site2016 in the psyche and culture of the STI. Policies on sexual harassment and policies sensitive the family roles of women are a must if we are to encourage women in building the human capital base of the STI.
The third call is for principles that address re-entry into the workplace after a career break, more specifically the introduction of re-entry programmes and support for potential re-entrants.
These should include child-care facilities and flexible options for nurturing mothers who are employed in positions that require them to be relatively mobile.
In closing, I thank all of you for your participation in this symposium. I hope that it will give you all - business leaders, academics, women’s associations in the STI and civil society – an opportunity to interact and discuss ways in which we can advance policy frameworks that are inclusive and supportive of women as participants in the STI.
I thank the National Advisory Council on Innovation which has already provided me with invaluable advice on gender policy.
