Director General Dr Phil Mjwara
Dr Romilla Maharaj, member of the National Advisory Council on Innovation (NACI) Science, Engineering and Technology for Women sub-committee
Members of the Science, Engineering and Technology for Women Advisory Committee
Staff members of the NACI secretariat
Representatives of all the public and private sectors
It’s a great pleasure to welcome you to this launch of the updated Facing the Facts booklet. A little background: a need to encourage women’s participation in the science, engineering and technology (SET) sector prompted the Science, Engineering and Technology for Women (SET4W) committee of NACI to commission a study on women in science. Out of that study NACI release a report called Facing the Facts in 2004. The report indicated that the participation of women in SET sector was weak.
The report’s publication was followed by the development of a monitoring and evaluation framework in 2005, with an aim to benchmark the performance of women in SET. Today we release an update of Facing the Facts. I’m going to leave the technical presentation to NACI, but I want to make three points about women in higher education in general.
First, there has been an expansion of participation in higher education by black and female students.
A decade ago one in four students was black; now three in four students in higher education are black. The government policy of expanding access to study at higher education institutions has been successful in attracting first generation black and female students into higher education.
Moreover, there was a remarkable gender reversal in the number of graduates. In 1995 there were more male graduates than females. However, by 2003 there were more female than male graduates. This means that during that period the growth of female graduates was faster than the growth of male graduates. This has positive implications for the promotion of equity in employment, as the pool of tertiary qualified women continues to expand.
However, this is less of a success than appears at first sight. White enrolments have fallen in numbers, most of the student increase has taken place at universities of technology, and African students are overwhelmingly represented in distance institutions. Moreover, the majority of black graduates are in the social sciences and not in the engineering sciences and technology. And the participation of 18 to 24 year olds has not increased beyond what it was a decade ago. Overall, the participation rate has risen most sharply for the affluent and not for the poor.
Second, we need more PhD graduates.
South Africa produces 1 200 PhD graduates a year and we have set ourselves a target of 6 000 a year. In 2005 half of those PhDs were in SET and we estimate that we need 3 000. To put this in international comparison: Australia produces about 7 000 PhD graduates per year, Germany produced more than 20 000 in 2005 and China is on a vertical climb with an estimated 35 000 or so in 2005 (The Graduate University of the Chinese Academy of Science alone has about 60 percent of the number of PhD students in the entire Australian sector).
Third, women have been increasing their share of SET graduates (as NACI will show you in a moment) but we need to do more and we need to be innovative in encouraging women to take up careers in science.
In 2006 the total number of SET graduates was 35 562 or 28 percent of all graduates. In developing countries in Asia–take South Korea-over 50 percent of tertiary graduates are in SET disciplines. That is a clear measure of where we need to be, and an indication of the role that women can play.
The updated Facing the Facts booklet is an important contribution to our efforts to mainstream women in the SET sector. I recommend that the public makes use of this booklet to inform strategic decisions in respective academia and workplaces.
I thank you
Issued by: Department of Science and Technology
25 August 2009
Source: Department of Science and Technology (http://www.dst.gov.za/)
