Meet the women of CSIRO

Attaining and maintaining gender equality is an important goal for any organisation, for a variety of reasons. 

A failure to attract and retain female workers means that half of the brightest minds, half of the inspirational leaders, and half of our future innovators are lost to us.

In addition to this, half of the money that our country invests in skills training and education is wasted.

Another reason to strive for equality is that men and women bring a different perspective to workplace challenges, and this diversity of opinion can help overcome problems and drive projects forward.

For these and many more reasons, CSIRO has a long history with successful women, across all areas of our organisation. 

The graph to the left shows the gender distribution of staff in 2008, depending on the level of seniority, from CSOF4 (typically early career researchers and junior staff) to CSOF8 (who are our principal scientists and leaders).  

While there are substantially more male staff than female, this graph fails to capture the great progress that has been made in recent years. 

To the right we can see a graph showing the increase in women at CSIRO at various levels. As this graph shows, the representation of women at CSIRO is steadily increasing, and in some cases has more than doubled in the past 15 years.

At each level there are many ways that women are making a difference at CSIRO, including scientific research, specialist technical areas and the business of running the organisation. 

Each of these areas typically has a different mix of men and women, as we can see in the graph below. 

In the business services, we have a large percentage of women, and this has been steady over the past 10 years.

During this time we have seen a slow increase in women in research positions and an increase in the number of women in general management and executive positions.

While we see fluctuations in the fraction of technical women, there has been little change on average over the past 10 years, and we encourage women with technical expertise to join us the coming decade.

You may find more information about the activities of our female staff throughout the CSIRO website, and from the following pages of profiles of our leading Women of CSIRO.