 and have a visit, that's where they are located. So the College of Business houses six schools and this is what's known as the Swanson Academic Building because it's on Swanson Street and this is the building I work in, in Melbourne. The research strength areas of my college are many and varied because of the six different schools and within each school there are different disciplines. So as I said, I'm in the School of Economics, Finance and Marketing, so three major disciplines, but even within those disciplines there are major differences. So for example, in the economics group, there are over 30 academics, three zero, and those 30 academics range from philosophical and theoretical economics through to applied, through to econometricians. So it's quite a spread. That's the schools and mine is the red one. Also within that are for what they call research groups, although we're going through the process now of changing the names and having platforms. I don't know if your university is like this, but we like to reinvent ourselves every few years and have the opportunity to strengthen those areas that we're particularly good at. So for my college, it's global business innovation, which is one of the main reasons that enables us to have an activity where we can come to Barcelona. This is my school, not that big. So on the left is, we have two deputy heads of one of learning and teaching and one of research and innovation, and because we have the multi-disciplines, we have a deputy head for each of the three disciplines, so finance, marketing, and economics. We also have a manager of planning and resources who's a professional staff member and makes sure that the academics have the resources that we need and don't spend too much money. And we also have a finance manager that Brydie works with Keith directly to fund the activities such as running our workshop here. So that's an overview of our school. The School of Economics, Finance, and Marketing had a broad research plan underpinned by two major strategies. The first was what we termed a global virtual classroom. We have campuses in Singapore, Vietnam, and Melbourne, and we were running classes under courses that students could be enrolled in all three of those campuses and work together on assessment. And that was about taking down those geographical boundaries and uniting them into a common subject. So for example, one of those subjects is global marketing and it meant that Vietnamese-based students were seeing advertising campaigns that were only in Singapore or only in Melbourne and vice versa, so it's quite a good one. The second one is RMIT Europe, a hub for research and that's where my workshop comes in. So as I said, we ran this first in 2014 and again now, and my vision is that we will run it every two years with a different focus each time depending on research strengths within the school. So two years ago it was sport and this year it's behavioral business but I've also bought a small group of sports academics with me and brought two from the University of Zaragoza to work with them. So each two years we have a new theme but there is a nod to the previous theme. We bring them together. We were talking about this earlier, my research interests are quite broad. If you imagine that your literature that you try to understand is a mountain, I want to scale two of them. So the first and my passion, where I did my PhD, where the bulk of my research sits is word of mouth referrals. In particular, traditional, so the verbal communications between friends or social networks where they actually know each other, compared with the technological enhanced or word of mouth where somebody could be posting on a social network where they might only actually know a few percent of the total network and that fascinates me. And our research is showing people are making quite hefty financial decisions, like purchasing a car for example or purchasing a property in a suburb that has been recommended on the strength of a social network where they might actually not know anybody as part of that group. We also look at fashion and the role of viral marketing in fashion because the fashion industry can be very socially networked and it's quite fascinating. From a behavioral business perspective, social research in social media enables us to see these real-time conversations. You can see how close the brand or the brand manager is to the conversation, how quickly they repost or how quickly they comment in reply to something else. And it's quite fascinating to see that. And it's something that traditional marketing has not allowed us to do because we can't see those kind of offline discussions. Plus everything is recorded, every icon, smile, every comma, every expletive. It's amazing from a research perspective to watch that behavior unfold. The second one and what I'm here today to talk about is my second passion, academic issues. And there's two broad underpinnings for that and it's the first that I'm talking about today, workload. And that's particularly about academic careers, academic progression and academic promotion. And the second part of that is I'm very interested in student performance. So I look at very briefly what we term at risk students. So these students are this close from being expelled of the university, right through to the high performing students. And what tends to happen in academic circles is we have what we call pastoral care programs aim to help the students who are failing. But we very rarely recognize these students at the other end and reward them for that high performance. I also spend my time understanding why these students are at risk and whether or not those pastoral care programs are actually helping. But it's workload that I will talk about today. So this is a comedian and he said that men naturally gravitate towards these higher paying jobs such as doctor or engineer or CEO. But women naturally gravitate to not so high paying like a female doctor, female CEO or a female engineer. And it's that kind of perspective that drew me first into this research plus being a female academic I was seeing this in the workplace. And when I first started researching about a decade ago, there was not a lot in that space. So I started researching it myself. What's interesting in Australia is it's a westernized country but it traditionally does not have a good history of gender equity. And it was actually very late in giving women the vote and enabling women into the workforce. New Zealand, our next door neighbor is far more advanced in this space. So what I looked at was from overall international perspective and then compared that to Australia and found that my own domestic country was quite sad in this regard. What we see globally is that there are far more female students entering university programs. If you collapse them all and just look overall, there's about 55 to 60% women or girls entering that area. But very few make it to the very top of the academic echelons. And in fact, it's less than a quarter to get all the way. That's flattening across traditional disciplines that are historically quite male dominated such as medical or engineering with the STEM, so-called STEM subjects, science, technology, engineering, math. But it's also in my own field, which is marketing, which has about 70% female graduates in an undergraduate marketing program. And yet still, it's a tiny group at the end to become female vice-chancellors. There are nine vice-chancellors who are female out of over 30 academic institutions in Australia. And in terms of female professorships, if we again flatten, so you have the academic rank, associate lecturer, lecturer, senior lecturer, associate professor, and then full prof, full professor. It takes on average 15 years longer for a female academic to make it to full professor in her male counterparts. So by the time she's promoted to full professor, she's about 55 years of age compared to 40 for her male counterparts. And I found that really intriguing and wanted to know why. So in Australia, we have a sex discrimination act. It should not be possible to gender discriminate. And yet it is. And we've had that for some 35 odd years, and yet it's still around. So it's quite scary. Women CEOs are still rare. In fact, just two months ago, the age, the Australian Age newspaper, which is kind of our dominant national newspaper, published the results where an institution, a research institution sent letters to the chairman of all of the Australian Stock Exchange registered companies and said, if they didn't have any females on the board, how come you don't have female board members? Do you know one of the reasons given was that the board meeting would go too long if we let women onto it. Because women just talk and talk and talk apparently. So I found it interesting. So we see job segregation. We see much slower career progressions and we see active sexism and discrimination in the workforces. Globally, and some of these are being followed through in Australia, but globally there are some wins. One of the more obvious ones is what's known as the Nameless CV. So they strip all of the identifying data out of a curriculum vitae. And people go up for a job on what is supposedly a level platform. Now there was talk in Australia of instituting such a policy into academia, but it becomes a little difficult if you are known for a topic. And everybody knows that you published on that topic in say the Journal of Consumer Research two years ago. So your Nameless CV suddenly becomes easily identifiable, especially if you think about how close academic circles can be. You don't know everybody in your academic circle, but we know of every piece of news going on in academic circles. It makes it a little harder. But there are things, the US Marines, I like this example, were going to change all of the terminology so that they were neutral, gender-neutral terms. So things like that can be quite an obvious approach, but they send a very strong message. Kate Jenkins is the chairman of the Sex Discrimination Board in Australia. And she posed this question about a half a year ago where she wondered why it was so bad for her to refer to the term sexism when it is still incredibly prevalent in Australia today. She posed that as a question. The amount of flak that she copped, the amount of angry comments being tweeted about her, was incredible. And I, for two reasons, I quite like this. The first that she poses what I think is a very interesting and relevant question. But the second for me was also why are people getting so angry about it as a question? She's not saying anything beyond how come. And people pounced on her for it. I thought if we're truly going to fix it as a problem, that response, that pounced response needs to be changed because it's kind of at the root of everything that we're saying is wrong. From an ethical perspective, equity is wrong, so inequity is wrong. These people should be treated equally. But from a business perspective, it can actually make a lot of sense. From the very first stages of shortlisting, if you are considering everybody in the pool, you have a better chance of finding the right person, the most qualified, or even the most innovative or amazing person for the job. If you cut your list of applicants in half and say only these may be shortlisted, who knows what you've missed out here? And there are profitability implications for that. And there's quite a lot of research and I can give you some of those references if you're interested. But quite a lot of research has actually looked at companies that have gender-neutral or gender-balanced boards and a workforce that is gender-balanced. And then some research has actually considered ethnicity balances within that as well. And it turns out, for the vast majority of time, those companies are more profitable. And it's things, especially in a business sense, because it aids innovation like nothing we've ever seen before. I teach this subject called design thinking. Is that a buzzword here at all? In Australia, it's huge. And design thinking simply means that the traditional business approach to thinking was that a company had a problem, therefore, figure out a solution and launch it. Design thinking, we take the students back a step and we want them to deeply understand the problem first because what they're actually trying to solve may not be the correct solution based on a deeper understanding of the problem. When we apply that kind of reasoning to having a gender-neutral board or a gender-neutral workforce, we see that those opportunities for innovation are greatly enhanced as opposed to having like-minded individuals. So in the case of some of the research, all white, all middle-aged males tackling problems, they couldn't help but come up with similar solutions all the time. There's no opportunity for innovate because there's nothing outside of their realities for them to draw on. This is why I'm a nerdy academic because I find stuff like that interesting. Resistance to change is embedded, and that's a global problem. We were talking earlier, it's not just... People talk about unconscious bias, they don't know that they're being biased, but that's actually not our biggest problem. Our biggest problem is conscious bias. It's when people say in an interview panel, oh, her influences for this dancing course are hip-hop, but his influences for classical music will go him. We think he'll be a better fit outside of their scope. That's actually a real example from real research that the female students' influences were hip-hop and the all-white, all-male panel didn't like that and actually discussed why she was an unsuitable candidate as opposed to the male applicant. So it's conscious bias. When people feel that they're perfectly justified in saying we shouldn't hire them because, and very rarely do they get questioned on that. Now, the flip side to that is a really interesting problem that my university is currently facing. So we've recently mandated a policy where all of our interview panels must be gender-neutral, which means as close to equals up, there's five people that need to be at least two fifths female. If we're interviewing for associate professor or full professor positions, the panel must be comprised of associate professors or full profs. You can't have senior lecturer level or below on that panel. Now, if you have a small pool of female professors to draw from, that means their workload has suddenly gone because now they get invited to every single one. To put that further into perspective, in my school, the School of Economics, Finance and Marketing, we have two and a half female professors out of about 85 staff, academic staff. And the point five is a shared position where she is point five in our school and point five in another department. So those two and a half female professors are now getting tapped on the shoulder for almost every single interview panel that comes up. And the workload implications are formidable. The difficulty now for them is if they say no, they look like they're not a team player. They get a bad reputation for being difficult or we asked her to do one thing and she said no. The other side to that is there are a lot of really qualified male academics who are saying, well, how come you don't need me anymore? I used to be the person that you guys tapped on the shoulder to be the independent expert on that topic in your school and now you don't want me because of some accident of my birth. So it's an interesting one, but I had no time did anybody kind of sit down and go, what are the repercussions for us instituting that sort of policy and what does it actually mean when you put it into the workforce? There's a whole heap of research on what's called the unpaid work. So generally, if you have a household with full time, husband or full time male, full time female and children, the female does her job, as well as two and a half more times caring and domestic duties. If you add that up in terms of the number of hours they work each and every day, becomes a really large number in a typical week. And there are repercussions then for career development, promotion, progression, especially in an organization such as academia which has what we define as an academically corporate culture, where the expectation is that we work long hours because it takes a long time to craft the sort of manuscript that gets accepted at a top journal. It also requires a lot to travel, not just to attend a workshop like this one but to attend a conference. We actually have one of our female professors in her entire career history at RMIT which is about eight years now has never once traveled to an international conference because she has an eight year old and a four year old. I just can't leave. And a partner who works shift work. So just can't, is not in a situation where she could travel. So that's the kind of corporate culture problem. So if we started looking at all the different problems they become this kind of perception that they're insurmountable but it's actually not so bad. I really like this example but it's a really sad example. So I don't know if you've heard of Eddie McGuire. Is this, do you know the term redneck? Dufus? He's a dweeb. He's a very rich football personality who owns an AFL Australian football league team and constantly talks when he should shush because a lot of what he says is complete garbage. So he and a group of other men made the comment on national radio that it would be a good way to raise money for a charity by drowning a Fairfax journalist who's a female. Ha, ha, ha, wouldn't that be a laugh? And some Australian high profile personalities spoke up and said, well, no. Drowning anybody to raise funds for a charity, not a good idea and certainly not joke-worthy material. And it was interesting how quickly this spread. When Eddie McGuire was told obviously by his sponsors and the media crews and whoever was his boss, you have to apologize. His apology was along the lines of, I'm really sorry the Australian public didn't have a sense of humor, which you can imagine didn't go over very well either. So what happened in a 57-second comment? A lot of what people like Kate Jenkins were trying to do with gender equality was completely destroyed because on the one hand we saw people getting really upset and saying this is not funny and unfortunately on the other, we got people saying, oh yeah, her, Caroline Wilson, best thing to happen is that she's an outspoken, opinionated journalist who challenges the male-dominated thinking on an almost daily basis. The fact that those two perspectives still exist is highly scary. Another example is the Australian government has been working with organizations like the Australian Computer Society to try to encourage females to enter into those professions. We also have another program in the construction industry which actually helps women to not only enter that industry but hopefully to stay and they're trying in their first instance to get women to stay for five years because they're leaving far sooner than that and then the goal is to increase it by five, so 10, 15, et cetera, try to get them to stay. Change is in the end. There's actually a women's equality fund now which looks globally at businesses and tracks the economic success of those financial business, marketing, consultancy, a whole range of industries and companies within those industries. They're actually presenting hard data that those companies that have gender equity are far more profitable. It's a bit hard to argue with hard data. So that's what Keef does. ANZ, Australian National and New Zealand, sorry, Australian and New Zealand Bank. It's a global operation now but mostly in most countries. They did a whole heap of stuff on role flexibility where they actually worked out that if their female employees couldn't make it to the early morning breakfast meeting, then they were probably going to be disadvantaged. And I think that's a lesson that universities can use because we often see International Women's Day events, breakfast, dinner, trying to celebrate international women. First thing, maybe schedule a lunch instead. Edith Cowan University. It's the only university in Australia named after a woman, Edith Cowan. One of their International Women's Day events, the female academic organizing it said it can't be a breakfast. They said, well, you can't do it during the day because we have teaching. All the rooms are full with classes. And her reply was, we have a marquee. So they have an Edith Cowan canvas tent, massive thing, but it costs a fair amount of money to set it up because it is so large. That's what we're doing. And the Vice Chancellor supported that. So they actually just held it out in the commons and it was lovely. And it was held at a time where women couldn't attend. From a university perspective or higher education industry perspective, change is also in the air, which is really exciting. Two that are really cool, Douglas Hilton, he's the Eliza Hill Institute of Medical Research Director. He actually created a whole heap of support programs for his female employees. And there are research institutes that have a lot of postdoctoral positions, a lot of PhD positions. So there's funding available for them if they attend a conference. If a female member of their staff attends a conference, there's funding available for them to take their kids or kid child. And to use some of the funding for babysitting or nanny support when they're attending the conference. They've actually partnered with other organisations, with other conference organisers to provide on-site Cres or child-minding facilities as well. He instituted a room where mothers could breastfeed their children and next to that room is another room where the kids can play. Before that, the staff at this particular medical centre were told if they were breastfeeding, they had to use the laboratory. When he came on board and took up this position, he said, that's disgusting. Why are we normalising that and suggesting that in any way that would be okay? So the room where the ladies can go and where the kids can play is actually attached to one of the main research labs. So these women can be working and have direct line of sight to where the kids are playing and there's staff on-site that actually look after those children as well. The other one is the Essex University. Have you heard of this one? I really like this example. You might have seen this in the news. Essex University mandated a pay rise for all of its female academics in the economics programme. They just woke up one morning to an email from their finance department that said, you're now at this salary, which is the same as all your male counterparts. And it was just a blanket increase from wherever they are. They did this when the news media's picked it up. They were asked why. The Vice Chancellor for Essex University said that the gender equity parity closure of that pay gap was taking too long. So he went, I'll fix it. And in a follow-up interview was asked, how do you do that? And he said, it's very easy. You tell payroll to pay them the same amount as what your male academic staff are getting. Done. Imagine how much media attention that caught. But today they're still the only university that have done it. Yeah, Hilton and American Chemical Society is also helping women to attend conferences by providing conference child mining facilities. And there are funding, some funding programs available for that as well, but it's still hard. There's also, the funding can be used if the female academic wants to travel to the conference, but they need someone to stay at home and look after the children. So either with a partner on their own. So some of the funding, you can perhaps fly a family member to come and stay at your place while you travel. So it's not always about you traveling with the children. There are other options available, but the fact that there are options is still surprisingly rare in this industry. So my research on higher education, why focus on it? Because it fascinated me that there was still this problem. And I was seeing it on a daily basis as well in terms of workload allocations. The person who allocated my workload some 10 years ago, a male, I asked him once about two years after I'd received my teaching program for four semesters previously why I seemed to have such a lot of courses or subjects to be responsible for and why a male counterpart of mine, Steve, didn't seem to have as many. The reply was, oh, I knew you could handle teaching more. So since the university is a seat of higher learning, it should be the fact that we're more enlightened, more equitable, but it's completely not the case. We don't have yet that critical mass of senior women who can drive that sort of change. So it behoves us to do it ourselves from the ground up and to enlist the aid of the male senior staff if we can. The picture is improving, but it's really mostly gloomy at this stage. And I'm going to show you one example before I then talk about my actual research results. Did anybody see this? Nobel Laureate Tim Hunt. So at a Korean conference, he's a British scholar and a Nobel Laureate, as I said, he's at a Korean conference where he actually extols his opinion on women in the labs. And the problem with women in the labs is that three things happen. You fall in love with them, they fall in love with you, or you criticize them and they cry. You can understand that didn't do so well. So Connie St. Louis was an attendee at this particular conference and she tweeted it and I got picked up. Now what was really interesting beyond the point of what a chauvinistic doofus he is, was that he was then interviewed saying, yes, but all my colleagues know I'm a chauvinist. And there's that conscious bias again. He's expecting just because he said it, it'll be okay. He acknowledged it now, it's not a problem. The public furor became so much that he was actually invited to retire. But that took several months after the actual conference had happened. And it was really only in the face of overwhelming global crankiness about such a thing actually happening. Ah, sorry, it's a long, sorry. Long standing issue in academic circles. If we look at Australia's history, Australia's record, it's pretty poor. So 13 on years ago, women represented only one in five university students. But a decade later, they represented only one or five of all academics. So it's not transitioning well. We make up now about 24, 25% of senior academic positions of females. So this was when I first came to this research, this was the picture that I was seeing. And it was a pretty gloomy sort of picture, especially because I was teaching undergraduate marketing subjects and seven eighths of my classroom were females, female students. I couldn't understand, where are they all going then? Plus looking around at my mentor and not a lot. I just wanted to give you a very quick picture and it's really just the top part of this. The sector of Australian higher education, about 55% female. The pink second from the top bar is female professors within that sector. We're a quarter, that's pretty sad. RMIT is my university, this one. It's about the same. So far more females employed at RMIT or about 60%. But then unfortunately, they're not getting to the professorial ranks. Globally the academic pay gap between male and female academics is about 24%. And that's true at RMIT as well. It's pretty close to that figure. Gender split by academic units. So a couple of years ago, sorry, 10 years ago, RMIT University was travelling quite well. But a couple of years ago, we got overtaken by the other Australian technology network members. So Australian universities are divided into categories, there's the group of eight Australian technology regional universities, for example. And we're doing really badly. So I kept my research up in the framework that this is both topical and relevant for me, for individual female academics, but also for my institution and the Australian picture as a whole. And it's a good tip if you're going for funding to show the relevance of your research beyond individuals or a single unit or department. So try to look globally or internationally as well as domestically and where that fits into that picture. So that's why I presented that. I do this research in conjunction with a professor, Sharon Rundl-Tealy at the Griffith University. Sharon is the Centre Director for the Centre for Social Marketing Research. We looked at actual workloads of academics. So previous research by Probert and a few others has actually looked at asking people about their workload from some historical context. So what did you teach last year? How many students did you have? We actually looked at the course guides who was listed as the course coordinator, how many students were actually enrolled. We also looked at research outputs. We calculated those if they had something published and it was sole author, it counted as one point. If there was more than one author, we divided that one by hell of many authors there were. We also looked at funding from two different perspectives. The obvious one is the amount of money that the grant received, the grant recipient received. But we also looked at the number of grants. So for example, two people might have 100,000 euro in funding, but one of them took five grants, had five successful grants and the other just had the one successful grant. So we were trying to consider the workload implications for lots of grants, lots of successful grants. And it's probably underpinned by a far greater amount of unsuccessful grants opposed to this one. And our universities that formed the sample, two capital city based institutions. If you're interested, these are all on Google Scholar. Our early work looked at regional universities, but we can't really tell that difference. So we've concentrated on the city based. The both institutions are business orientated. Results, funnily enough, as you would expect, there is a clear distinction in research output between senior, mid-curia and junior. So associate level lecturer and lecturer, considered junior. It's got senior lecturers that kind of mid-curia and then your associate professors and professors. So despite this gender equity and legislation for that, we could actually track a very significant difference in the workloads. What did that actually look like? Female senior lecturers, the ones in the middle band, outperformed every single rank. So all male profs, associate professors, senior lecturers, lecturers and associate lecturers. And the females also outperformed female professors and associate professors. So that middle band were working extremely hard and getting paid a senior lecturer wage. So I quite liked that picture, women just like men, but cheaper. We actually looked at the descriptive statistics and we found that if you just compared the professors and the associate professors with each other, female associate professors and professors were outperforming the males. And this is not just by a little bit, this is significant differences. When we published the research, one of the comments we got back was, couldn't the pipeline just account for those differences? So as they were dropping out to have children and then coming back in, we actually wrote a response to that saying, if it was just a pipeline and then they come back and it's all equal, I should expect to see the same number that went in at the other end. But just a difference in average age. And we don't see that. We see 75, 80% disappearing somewhere else and never coming back. If this was anything other than a human resources problem, we would have solved it by now. For some reason it's just pushed to the bottom of the agenda. In the time that I've been studying this topic, it's amazing how the topic becomes everybody, just me, everybody, just me, or that's my perception. But it seems to gain in media attention and university focus before being dropped again for another couple of years. And that's something you may find as you start developing women and research type groups yourself. There'll be sometimes when your institutions want to throw resources at you and other times when they've got something else that they're working on. And that's where the resources are going until it comes back to the women and research group. We actually suggested that there's some grassroots changes that need to be enacted and there's some policy changes. The interesting thing from my perspective is that some of those grassroots changes you have to just introduce them yourself. And some of them you can beg and plead and ask your institutions to support. So it becomes an interesting balancing act. So institutional practice at academic institutions still to this day favor that long hours workload model where people are sort of expected to be working all the time and technology really does enable that. Especially now on planes we've got Wi-Fi, internet access. There's no reason why you can't be marking as you fly somewhere to teach or do whatever. And that probably needs to change drastically given I think academia now has the highest or one of the highest rates of depression and anxiety diagnosis than a lot of other industries. So it's a bit scary as well. We expect our academics to publish widely to remain on top of a whole different bunch of literature to become internationally recognized to have impact and to also achieve incredibly high teaching scores. And mandating for all of that within a certain workload. So for example, 1,680 hours is problematic. At a university level, we were suggesting things like teaching buyout. If you want them to focus on research, if they've just come back from maternity leave, for instance, you bring them back. You don't let them teach for the first six months so they can get some of those research programs back in sync again and working. Lot of discussion on training and professional development and it was an interesting one because a lot of academic institutions and certainly the two in our study have training and professional development programs but there's a big difference between teaching somebody how to better present in front of a classroom, for example, and teaching them how to present their CV or to write the rope section of a category one external grant application. Or even getting them to think about their career in terms of you had career interruption for two years when you were at home with your son. You now need to put that into the context of your career and selling that. So we're actually talking about different types of training within those sorts of programs. We need to broaden the definition for what is a promotable academic and I'm on a workforce planning committee at the moment which is looking at alternative pathways to promotion which is something when you say it, you think, well, duh, but we're only doing that now. And I've talked to colleagues at other institutions and it's a relatively new thing to actually recognize that there might be different way. I was talking to an academic a couple of months ago who's Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander and she was hired because of that connection to the Aboriginal community and her job is to basically sell this particular institution in those communities but that's not getting her promoted. So she's hired and given a specific mandate and then she's going to the promotions panel to go from a junior academic to a senior academic. She's going to the promotions program and saying this is the number of students I have brought, these are the new community developments that I have given you and they're saying yes, but you didn't publish very much. So that was the feedback. So we need to look at that one. There's a situation now I'm seeing it more often where male academics in the marketing industry are refusing to accept a keynote presentation at a conference unless they can see that there is gender equity. And it's become, it's an interesting one. Like I said, marketing is traditionally female orientated in terms of the students, but not at the top end. So if you are organizing a conference and you have an all male keynote speaker list or an all male panel of meet the experts in marketing, you have to wonder why? Because there's not a shortage of female professors who are doing amazing things. I can point to pretty much all of them at that top, but getting them recognized at a conference invitation is kind of the next step. From a grassroots level, and this is something I was suggesting, if it's not in play, you start it yourself, which is what I did. So I valued the opportunity to have, if I have to go to the gym, it's better if I'm going to meet someone there who'll be disappointed or cranky with me if I don't turn up. If it's just me going to go to the gym this afternoon, it's a good chance it's not going to happen. Especially if it's a bit hot or just can't be bothered. I was like that with my writing. If I thought if I had someone I was writing with, I'd be more motivated. My university didn't have a writing group for staff, so I started one. That writing group is now being run for higher degree by research students, so PhD and masters by research students as well. And if you want to indulge me a moment, I'll actually show you what my program looks like. So this is a blog post. It's called The Research Whisperer. It was started by two academics. One at La Trobe University and one at RMIT University. And it's open for anybody if you wanted to have a look at the articles. They post a lot of their own work as well as the work from other people. I can send you the email address if you guys want. So I wrote an article earlier this month on my writing groups. We have the analogy of landing planes. So your goal for a 12 week semester is to land a particular plane. So it's to submit a manuscript to that journal. That would be one plane. Some staff have multiple planes. The idea is you choose the one that is closest to land and land that sucker. What usually happens with our workload is I've got this project with you. I've got this project with someone else. These are the half a dozen projects out here and they all circle the airport for the next 12 months, two years, three years, five years, I'm embarrassed to say. One I just recently landed was 10 years of circling. Now that might include the time where you submitted it and it got rejected or it went through three rounds of revise and resubmit. But these planes are all circling. So in my writing group, we choose the ones that are closest to landing and we spend 12 weeks landing them. I have two face-to-face sessions each week. The first is on the Monday where we meet for one hour and we talk about what we're going to do that week in terms of landing that plane. And that requires really specific tasks because that's another part of the problem where we go. Yep, I gotta work on that paper about academic workload. Might just go get a coffee. And then I come back, I work on the paper about academic workload. And I come back and I got my coffee and then the phone rings. Oh, I'll just answer that. And the whole day has gone by. So what my writing participants have to do is say this week, I will write my abstract for the academic workload paper. I will identify the target journal and I will download the journal editor's requirements. I will look at the conclusions from the previous piece of research that this has now worked towards. And I will make a list of what it is I said I would focus on in the next piece of research. Then when I come back for my coffee, because I can't not get the coffee, of course. I come back with my coffee. I now know, write the abstract tick. So that's what my participants have to do. On Friday afternoons, we meet and we do what's called shut up and write. Have you heard that's a hashtag as well if you're interested in looking it up? But basically, and I'm very hard taskmaster in this, we all sit down at a table with our laptops and we shut up and write. And we do that for 25 minutes. This is a program called team time. And my husband wrote this software. So I'm particularly proud of it. But this is what all my writing participants get access to. We all sit around and we press start. It times 25 minutes. And then each person's total number of writing sessions is calculated. And it's put on a leaderboard as you can see. This also means that writing participants can do these writing sessions 24 hours a day, seven days a week from anywhere in the world. But it makes writing a social activity. And it's very obviously a very individual solo activity, which can be quite lonely, quite confronting. But if you know we're writing for our group, like gym membership, then that's what they kind of resonate with and it works towards that. Each week I give out prizes as well. And if they don't make a minimum of five writing sessions each week, they are charged of fine. And I use that money to buy things like a cake or I might have a lucky door prize. The only thing I don't reward is the leaderboard position. So if somebody was doing a lot of writing sessions, so this is three weeks into the program, this person's done almost 50 writing sessions. I don't ever reward that because the idea is not to do the most. And people are at different stages. If someone was on research leave, I would expect them to achieve a lot more than someone who is doing teaching and administrative and leadership and writing. So but the idea is to make this a social activity. If you're also interested in this article, one of the participants, my article is based on the organizers perspective, but Warren is one of my regular participants. So he's been with me since I started this program, the writing challenge program. So you can hear about it from a participants perspective. There's also writing retreats where everybody goes somewhere else and writes and you don't need to be in a hotel or a glamorous location. You can all go to a coffee shop, but the idea is get away from your regular desk and write. Plus if you're in a coffee shop, it's really handy as well. So we asked our academic institutions if they're not supplying it, can we start it up? And in the case of my writing group, I just started it within the school and it was then picked up by my college. So it's now a funded program. Every participant gets a copy of a book, How to Write an Article in 12 Weeks, by Wendy Laura Belchard. But we could also run writing retreats, and this is what I was talking about professional development, run a writing retreat on how to write a promotion application or how to write an external grant application or things where people need real help. You actually then have to really carefully select who runs those programs because they have to be people who've been through it recently and can talk with expertise in that space. We should also develop overall workload guides. We need to show expected levels for performance and then help people meaningfully achieve them. I think some institutions kind of have random targets sometime and you need to form a supportive and helpful group. And in my case, that's the Women in Research Group which was started by a female professor in our school, professor of economics, Lisa Farrell. And when she came on as chair, I was deputy chair and we had that mandate to create a very inclusive and helpful group for our participants, for our members. Another thing I just wanted to share with you is another Vice Chancellor's perspective. She said, well, we don't need is another report on the leaky pipeline because we all know about it. What we actually need is action. And a lot of that it means what do you have to do? So she defines the labyrinth of leadership. She says that you basically, it might be a windy path but you'll get there in the end. But to get there, what you don't need is a mentor. Who's got a mentor? No one? So she recommends not just a mentor but what you want is a sponsor. And a sponsor doesn't necessarily have to be the same as your mentor, you can have two different. But a sponsor is the sort of person who will put your name forward and advocate on your behalf. And most female academics in the research that's come out of this don't have a sponsor. They might have a mentor who says, how are you feeling and let's go for a coffee and group hug all around. But what you need is that someone says, hey, did you put your hand up for that short term contract as director of that center? Because if not, you should. Or they're in a meeting where you're not and someone says, who can we tap on the shoulder for this? And your sponsor is saying, oh, I know someone. Go call them. That's what you need. So the women and research group, if you don't have it, start it because they're hugely beneficial and just amazing. We try to foster high class and high quality research outputs, but it's not always about research outputs. It's about research environment and the culture as well. So we talk about things like dealing with stress as much as we might talk about how to craft a better title for your paper. So that's my newsletter there. If you want, you can go to that website link and all the previous issues are located there. And if you would like to submit an article to the newsletter, I'd be delighted to feature you, male or female. The aim is to just talk about topics that need to be talked about. So in the most recent issue, for example, one of the female professors who's also a discipline leader talked about maternity leave and how to get it sorted out pre, what you're doing during and post coming back from maternity leave. Because that was a question they noticed they were getting asked a lot. Why am I here? I'd love to talk to anybody about word of mouth or academic issue research if you want to. And I'd also love to chat with anyone about EFM, my school and UPF research opportunities if you are interested. And the brochures are up here if you would like one. Thank you.