Engineers Australia is the national professional association for engineers. According to Engineers Australia’s The Engineering Profession: A Statistical Overview latest 2023 report, “it will take qualified female engineers, 70.8 years to be as equally distributed in the engineering profession as their male counterparts.” The Australian Council of Engineering Deans (ACED) created the Australian Engineering Higher Education Statistics Engineers report in 2022. The report revealed that women represent less than one-quarter of research-only positions and less than one-fifth of teaching positions among Australia’s institutions. According to Elsevier, in 2022, the share of women researchers in Australia was 46.0%. Although women engineering scholars represent almost half of researchers in Australia, their research impact is less than that of their male counterparts.
2022
Elsevier
Elsevier provided a field-weighted citation impact (FWCI) indicator to measure the academic impact of a publication. Examining research impact by gender in Australia reveals women have a lower research impact in engineering than men, and this finding holds across career stage. Although women scholars represent almost half of researchers in Australia, their (1.32) FWCI in 2022 was less than that of their male counterparts (1.40). To view additional information on research impact, including trends over time and data broken down by type of publication, visit the Progress Toward Gender Equality In Research And Innovation Dashboard.
2021
Engineers Australia
According to Engineers Australia, women accounted for 15.3% of the nation’s engineer workforce in 2021. 15.9% of qualified engineers in the labor force were women, with 14.0% of these female engineers working in engineering occupations. There are over twice as many international females, or 67.6%, working as engineers in Australia than Australian-born women.
*Females as a percent of total within each category shown in figure
Women are highly underrepresented in chief executives and managing directors positions across age categories. Less than 13% of these positions are comprised of women.
2010-2020
ACED
According to the ACED, women represent about 20% of research and teaching positions in Engineering & Related Technologies in Australia’s institutions. They have the highest representation (over 30% of teaching positions) at the lower B-academic level (academic levels are represented as A through E, with E being the highest level).
*Proportions of women academic staff (FTE)
Resources
- Elsevier. (2024). Progress Toward Gender Equality In Research And Innovation.
- Engineers Australia. (2023). The Engineering Profession: A Statistical Overview Fifteenth Edition.
- The Australian Council of Engineering Deans. (2022). Australian Engineering Higher Education Statistics 2010-2020.