News & Updates

We have a paper out today on "Invisible women: Gender representation in high school science courses across Australia", published in the Australian Journal of Education. We started the work for this publication back in 2020. We analysed the Year 11/12 courses for Biology, Chemistry, Physics and Environmental Science across Australia.

So what did we find?

Of the 145 uniquely mentioned scientists, only one was female, Rosalind Franklin, and only in the QLD, SA & NT courses. We also did a breakdown of which mentions are related to the scientist compared (scientist mentions) to how many were mentions due to a law or idea being named after them (concept mentions). Courses had up to 37% (e.g. NSW) of 'scientist mentions' but no women mentioned!

For those who love data, find all the data and scripts on our GitHub page.

The IncludeHer team is working on a program for schools to bring diverse role models into the classroom! With the support of the community we aim to develop a program to bring role models into the classrooms for students across Australia. This program will run alongside teacher training sessions to help build class plans incorporating diverse examples of scientists without putting the onus on teachers to develop them themselves. 

We have received support from several notable scientific organisations, individuals and political figures. These include the Astronomical Society of Australia, Australian Geographic, Arid Recovery, Professor Lisa Harvey-Smith, Professor Emma Johnston, Professor Alan Duffy, Richard Di Natale and several Superstars of STEM. We are also working with the NSW Education Standards Authority (NESA) and QLD Curriculum and Assessments Authority (QCAA) on developing year 11 and year 12 science courses to increase female scientists' representation.

We have started a GoFundMe to be able to finance the following activities:

• Develop and distribute a range of materials to teachers, including posters, flyers and worksheets

• Speaker fees to avoid free labour from already underrepresented and overworked minorities in STEM

• Travel costs to travel to remote schools

IncludeHer aims to be a voice of the community and work with curricula developers to help produce the best possible science curriculum for all students, and with your support we can achieve this.

We are incredibly excited to announce a new collaboration with Queensland Curriculum & Assessment Authority (QCAA)! Our IncludeHer representatives are working with QLD curriculum developers to create inclusive STEM courses for high school students. Our QLD representative Tegan Clark who will be working directly with QLD has made it a focus of their new curriculum development to ensure they are representing the desires everyone in the community. This includes supporting aspiring female students.

Guess what!? We've reached 2500 signatures in our petition! This is even more proof that our community and society want to see women included and integrated into high school science courses.

2,500 is a lot of people and we are going to keep working to bring about these changes. It certainly doesn't stop here!

People are joining the movement, with volunteers diving into an analysis of science curricula across Australia. Following the analysis of NSW year 11/12 sciences, we have already started looking at the VIC and WA science curriculum's.