1989 School Magazine

anticipation of a long summer holiday, and excitement about the next stage of your lives - whether you will be undertaking studies at a University or at a College of Advanced Education, commencing training for a career such as nursing, beginning an apprenticeship or taking a secretarial or similar course of study. Many of you will regret the termination of your school days - knowing that you will miss the close friendships, the keen competition in sport, the association with teachers for whom, particularly in your senior years, you will have found yourselves developing respect, appreciation and affection. Feelings and preoccupations such as these are probably uppermost in the minds of those students who are facing their final days at school. However, because of the education and guidance which your parents, in partnership with your school, have made available to you, I know that you will have given also a good deal of thought to deeper concerns - to matters such as your responsibilities to the school community, to your family, to yourself and to the world at large. lt is about the ideals of service to your community and to your nation, and about your potential to contribute to the development of this great country that I wish to speak to you this afternoon. At this point in our history, there is a huge potential for young women to go forward into areas of business and professional life and into occupations and trades which, only as recently as tvventy years ago, were regarded as the right and proper pursuits of men only. Fortunately for women, and for society in general, many of those attitudes are changing and many people now recognise that women may take their places alongside men in occupations and professions which have traditionally been the province only for men. lndeed, a recent national repoft about education for engineering - once considered that most male of occupations - the Williams Report - said: "The Engineering Profession is impoverished by its failure to attract females." Apart from the impoverishment which engineering suffers because of low participation by women, there is a general concern that Australia will lose its technological base as a productive, exporting nation if more young people, and women particularly, are not encouraged to enter the engi- neering profession. Measured in terms of the technology exported by Australia per head of population, we rank fourth last out of the group of twenty-four O.E.C.D. countries to which we belong. This means that we are not considered as being in the forefront of nations who are designing and making the products which are in demand throughout the world. lt is estimated that in order to overcome this technological backwardness, an additional 20,000 professional engineers are required. Sir James Foots, the Chancellor of the University of Queensland, when speaking about this problem recently, said: "lt is sad that the Engineering Profession, which makes such an important contribution to our living standards, is missing out on so many of the best brains in the country." He went on: "The Profession has a responsibility to break down the kinds of misconceptions that picture engineering as being involved with big machines, dirt, grease and sweat rather than intellectual skills, creativeness, computers and human problems." Fortunately there are signs that bright young women with the necessary mathematical skills - and importantly - the

capacity for problem solving, are starting to respond to the opportunities in engineering. For example, the Williams Report shows that in the seven years from 1979 to 1986, the percentage of women graduating from engineering courses around Australia rose from 2.5o/o lo 6.1%. Furthermore, the Dean of Engineering at the University of Queensland has told me that in 1988, 14.5o/o of the first year intake to the faculty were young women. Although these figures indicate that the majority of practi- tioners in these long established professions are still men, it is a fact that formal or legislative barriers against women have long been removed. There has been, as we all know, a great deal of discrimination against women in the Professions, and it reflected certain attitudes, many of which, fortunately, will be foreign to young women of today. For example, the first female medical students who gained entry to medicine at Melbourne University in 1887 found that they nad great difficulty in obtaining appointments as Resident Medical Officers in hospitals. Queensland admitted women to practise as Lawyers only in 1905, and in New South Wales women were debarred until 1921 when Miss Emily Evans, a Sydney Law Craduate, succeeded in signing the roll after a long campaign. ln England prior to 1919, the lnns of Court, which have the exclusive right to admit persons to practise as Barristers, had refused admission to several women applicants, and the Law Society had obtained a Court Judgement preventing them from being admitted as Solicitors. ln 1919 in England the Sex Discrimination (Removal) Act was passed and it opened all professions to women. There was one impoftant exception made to this act by Order-in- Council, namely, that the Diplomatic and Consular Services and ceftain Higher Civil Service Appointments were reserved to men, and this barrier was not removed until 1946. But, despite the enactment of liberalising legislation, women were, for some time, inhibited from participating fully in professional life. May I illustrate this point by referringto the case of the First Woman Craduate from the University of Queensland Law School, Miss Una Bick - who later became Mrs Una Prentice. She said that when she sought employment she found that Society and the Legal Profession were not then ready to accept a woman as a Legal Practitioner if suitably qualified men were available. However, the onset of war with its accompanying depletion of the ranks of male Lawyers provided her first employment opportunity with the Commonwealth Crown Solicitor. This was two years after she had graduated. From the initial interview she well understood that her position would be temporary, namely, for the duration of the war when it was to be relinquished in favour of a returned serviceman. Fufthermore, the Commonwealth Covernment at that time had no salary scales for women in occupations other than Vping. She was duly remunerated according to the salary scale for typists, and was then junior to some typists many years younger than herself whose education had not gone beyond Junior or Scholarship. As well as her legal dutiei she was required also to perform the role of bookkeeper, a task not assigned to her male colleagues. Many anomalies such as these have now been removed