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SOME people found Alecia Allaway’s choice of career a little surprising, but the 18-year-old says she has been overwhelmingly supported in her entry into a male-dominated industry.
The apprentice electrician began working with Laser Electrical Bendigo in late January, following an eight-week work experience stint.
While women are uncommon on the work site, so far she has found working with the blokes a positive experience, with most “really supportive” and more than happy to lend a hand.
Ms Allaway is one of a growing number of women taking on a career in the industry.
The workforce of the electricity, gas, water and waste services industry remains mostly male, but female participation is growing: in 1995 women made up 15.5 per cent of the industry’s workforce, but 20 years later this had increased to nearly 21 per cent.
Overall, just under 15 per cent of technicians and tradespeople were female in 2015, up from 12.4 per cent in 1995.
The fields of science, technology, engineering and maths (or STEM) are also well-known for being dominated by men.
Associate Professor Katherine Legge said she was “a bit of an oddity” when she first entered her field.
The local physicist said she had not come up against negativity from family or colleagues, but she was conscious of societal expectations and attitudes.
“You’re going against society’s norm, and then society needs to work out what they’re going to do about it,” Dr Legge said.
Figures from 2014 show that just over 32 per cent of academic and research staff in STEM fields in Australia were female.
The gender gap was the narrowest at the junior academic level, where nearly 42 per cent of staff members were female, but it widened from there onwards: at the senior professor level, men made up more than 86 per cent of staff.
The greatest difference between the proportion of male and female staff was in engineering, where women made up just 18 per cent of academic staff.
Women, men still separate in work
THE Australian labour market remains highly segregated by gender.
Research from the federal Workplace Gender Equality Agency shows that while roughly half of male-dominated industries in Australia, including transport, electricity, and gas and water services, saw growth in female representation from 1995 to 2015, there were declines in construction and wholesale trade.
Meanwhile, female-dominated industries, such as healthcare and education, saw the proportion of female participation rise.
In 2015, just 12 per cent of all people employed in construction were female.
Of the male-dominated industries, agriculture, fishing and forestry had the highest rate of female participation, at nearly 34 per cent.
The average full-time base salary in male-dominated organisations was higher than that of female-dominated organisations.
Men’s average base salary in both male- and female-dominated organisations was higher than women’s, with the difference most pronounced in male-dominated organisations.