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Renee Wootton didn’t set out to smash any stereotypes, she just wanted to find friends when she moved to live with her grandparents in Marlee, a small town on the mid north coast of New South Wales.
But when she joined the Australian Air Force Cadets as a teen, she discovered a passion for aircraft that led her to a career in aerospace engineering – an unusual choice for a woman, especially one with an Indigenous background.
Wootton, now 23, is in the graduate program at Qantas with an honours degree under her belt, thanks to her own hard work and dedication and a number of programs that gave her a helping hand.
Putting to one side the dearth of female engineers (around 14% of enrolments), the number of Indigenous students who enrol in Stem courses (science, technology, engineering and maths) is tiny – fewer than 1%. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students represent around 1.4% (pdf) of all university enrolments. Around 3% of the Australian population is Indigenous.
This absence from Stem is locking them out of some of the most rewarding and high-paying jobs. Of fast-growing occupations, 75% require Stem skills.
Wootton says she had a drive to achieve: “For me, I didn’t have a family that stuck together. My parents divorced early on and Mum never really had a steady job – so that was a life I didn’t want for myself”.
Once Wootton discovered her love for aircraft engines, she took extra tutoring at school to try to get the marks she needed to get to university.
The aerospace engineering course at the University of NSW required an ATAR score of 93. Wootton achieved 80.71, but was awarded entry into an alternative pathway for Indigenous students, via a diploma in science, engineering and technology. After a year, she was able to transfer to the degree course.
In Sydney, she joined a mentoring and support service for Indigenous university students, CareerTrackers, which placed her in an internship at Qantas.
Qantas group executive of brand, marketing and corporate affairs, Olivia Wirth, says around 1% (317 people) of the airline’s employees are of Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander background.
Qantas is working towards a target of 1.5% by 2018 and, once it achieves that, will continue to keep increasing the proportion, she says.
“We are the national carrier and that has a lot of meaning. We believe it is important to play a leadership role – across the issue of diversity, not just Indigenous diversity,” she says.
“We believe reconciliation is important and we want to have a positive impact on the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community.”
The airline has a number of Indigenous employment programs in place, but last year was one of the first companies to sign a 10-year contract with CareerTrackers. Qantas will provide a minimum of 250 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander internships over 10 years, with 100 Indigenous internships over the first three years.
Wirth says the airline has a focus on getting diversity in the people employed in its Stem roles, which include pilots and engineers, and Indigenous people have been part of that.
Michael Combs is the founder of CareerTrackers, now in its seventh year, and says 94% of its interns graduate from university (compared with the 40% of Indigenous students not in the program).
Combs credits this success rate to the sense of community, mutual support and accountability generated among the interns.
Combs says around 200 CareerTrackers students are doing Stem degrees and are being recruited by a wide range of companies which are looking for the “Stem way of thinking”.
Australian software company Atlassian is looking for ways to employ more people of Indigenous background and has so far hosted one intern through CareerTrackers last summer. “He was a first-year IT student at uni and he was so great that we are bringing him back for a second internship,” says head of diversity, Aubrey Blanche.
“That is definitely a partnership we are looking at continuing in the future.”
Last year, the CSIRO and BHP Billiton Foundation launched the $28.8m Indigenous Stem education program. This ambitious five-year project has the twin aims of encouraging Indigenous students into Stem careers, while integrating traditional Indigenous science into school curricula.
The project director of the Indigenous Stem education program, Therese Postma, says integrating Indigenous content into schools’ science classes is a way of engaging the interest of Indigenous and non-Indigenous children.
“There is literature that says Indigenous students are slightly more interested in science than non-Indigenous students,” she says.
“I think that links back to [the fact] there are still a lot who are working on the land and that links to responsibilities, what their family do, culturally, and cultural practices.”
This program also runs free summer schools for year 10 Indigenous students, across the country. “The feedback we have had from those summer schools has been that students have come there thinking they might be a bricklayer in their community – and have left thinking they can be an engineer,” says Postma.
They can then take part in a leadership program, which supports them through the rest of their high school years and provides workplace opportunities in Stem areas.
Students are also offered a place in a Melbourne University-run bachelor of science, which is extended an extra year to four years so that young people who may face greater challenges in a tertiary education environment have time to get up to speed.
These university students are not required to qualify by their Atar score, but are accepted for their passion and interest in the subject. It is hoped that, at the end of the five years of BHP Billiton foundation funding, many of the elements of the program will have become self-sustaining and that funding can be found for the rest.
Aboriginal-owned business, Indigi Lab, promotes Indigenous science, while also encouraging Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children to take up Stem careers. Co-founder Luke Briscoe, a Kuku Yalanji man from far north Queensland explains Indigenous science has been around for 80,000 years or more. “Science for Indigenous people is a way of knowing and a way of life. It is part of our culture,” he says.
In November, Indigi Lab is delivering an ecotech program to 130 Indigenous youth, covering subjects such as project planning, cultural brokerage, app development and marketing.
It is also holding a panel discussion with scientist Dr David Suzuki on 28 October at the Powerhouse Museum on how Indigenous and western sciences and knowledge systems can work together. It’s a discussion many can learn from.
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