An Australian university is reserving an entire academic recruitment round for women, in a bid to help rebalance its engineering?faculty.?

The University of Sydney is only accepting applications from females in its seven-week campaign to hire academics for four of its seven engineering schools.

Just 14 per cent of working Australian engineers are women, according to an of 2021 census data. A 2022 Group of Eight report found that a lack of diversity in the profession, particularly around gender, was contributing to a workforce ¡°crisis¡± threatening to undermine the country¡¯s ambitions to build nuclear-powered submarines, scale up manufacturing and revive its space industry.

Renae Ryan, associate dean of culture and community in Sydney¡¯s engineering faculty, said some women were leaving the profession. But the bigger problem was that too few trained for it in the first place.

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¡°We are¡­trying to recruit more women into the degrees, but also more women staff, because it¡¯s all linked,¡± said Ryan, former academic director of Sydney¡¯s Sage programme. ¡°They¡¯ll be role models for our students as well.¡±

The recruitment drive, open until 25 August, focuses on aerospace, civil engineering, computer science, electrical engineering, mechanical engineering and mechatronics. The university said women occupied fewer than 18 per cent of continuing academic positions in these areas compared to around 30 per cent in other engineering disciplines.

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Ryan said female-only recruitment was ¡°not overly common¡± in Australian universities and tended to involve handfuls of jobs. ¡°I don¡¯t think anyone¡¯s done it [at] this kind of scale.¡±

She said the faculty was in growth mode because academic ranks had not kept pace with enrolments. Engineering faculties often relied on recruitment rounds, rather than ad hoc hiring when positions became vacant, partly because there was considerable interflow of engineers between industry and academia.

Ryan said the faculty did not have a target number for its recruitment campaign. ¡°We¡­just want to see what¡¯s out there. We¡¯ve already got some great applications. Things are interesting in the United States at the moment so we may get people from there that are willing to move.¡±

Sydney¡¯s engineering performance earned the university a top rating in the final Excellence in Research for Australia assessment exercise, and 61st?place globally in ÌÇÐÄVlog¡¯s latest subject rankings. Ryan was not concerned that the university could deny itself top academics by limiting recruitment to women.

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She said the faculty would only accept ¡°outstanding¡± applicants. ¡°We will still recruit on merit¡­but merit is very subjective, and it is influenced by the people doing the recruiting. Not everyone has the same access to opportunity.¡±

She said experience elsewhere suggested that women were motivated to apply for female-only positions, despite reservations about perceptions of special treatment, partly because they knew they would not be the odd ones out. ¡°When you see a place that¡­consistently appoints men, you just don¡¯t feel it¡¯s necessarily somewhere you want to work.¡±

Ryan was also unconcerned that the approach could deprive junior staff of mentors, with the faculty already graced by ¡°lots of senior men¡± and a ¡°regular¡± recruitment round ¨C open to all ¨C scheduled from late September.

¡°There are always other opportunities to recruit. We¡¯re just going to do this as a kind of one-off and see how it goes. We may do it again; I don¡¯t know. It¡¯s an experiment.¡±

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john.ross@timeshighereducation.com