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An endowed chair professor of Korean studies offers some insights on how listening to the past can help women rewrite the future Professor Hyaeweol Choi has travelled the globe, riding on a new wave which was never meant to take her overseas. The ANU-Korea Foundation Professor of Korean Studies – who moved to Australia in 2010 after spending 22 years in the United States – says that when she was younger she never planned to...
An Indigenous health project officer who always meets a challenge “I can remember my father saying to me as a teenager ‘you’re just a girl, you don’t need an education,’” says Gaye Doolan. Now as the Indigenous Health Project Officer in the School of Rural and Indigenous Health at the Medical School her injunction to others is different: “don’t rule out going back to school, don’t rule out anything!” Perhaps with an echo of her...
Nurturing confident children and easing working parent stress No working parent, and that still means more women than men, can be inspiring in their career without access to the essential support of quality care for their pre-school children. The Acton Early Childhood Centre (AECC) and its current director, Nadia Frankham, have created a nurturing environment for the children of the University’s diverse community of students, teachers and administration staff. The homely atmosphere and educational richness...
Proof that there are many paths to success for a determined woman The journey to academic prominence can take many different paths. For as many career scholars who completed, maybe even started, their undergraduate studies knowing that they are destined for the academic world, there are those who come to it late or who combine scholarship with other professional interests. Professor Shirley Gregor, Foundation Professor of Information Systems at ANU is a prime example of...
A popular café proprietor inspires the university community with her courage When Judy Hodgins’ son went missing in Mexico, she went through the worst period of her life. “We went into the police station to report him missing to Interpol because we hadn’t heard from him,” says Judy, recounting the disappearance of her son Alex in January 2010. “We saw those photos of missing people. The worst week of my life was when he was...
An award-winning astronomer who needs both career and family “When I was younger, I read books like Trixie Belden, where the girls thought physics, geometry and trigonometry were too hard,” says astrophysicist Professor Lisa Kewley. “I had gotten the idea from those books that physics would be too hard, but then I found I actually enjoyed it.” Lisa’s mother had grown up in a time when this Trixie Belden mentality was the norm. “She wanted...
A life and work motivated by issues of equity Heather McEwen’s first experience of inequity and the possibilities of change was in the potato fields of Norfolk, England, when she challenged a farmer’s pay scales. Heather was just a teenager on a school holiday job following the tractors to fill plastic baskets with potatoes that were heaved to the end of the row to fill large skips. It was back-breaking and dirty work. The women...
