University of the Sunshine Coast bans men from applying for engineering associate professor role

The University of the Sunshine Coast is one of those small-but-important teaching institutions which provide professional qualifications in regional Australian, educating many students who do not have the financial resources, or grades, to study at the more prestigious capital city-based universities.

Which is why it is strange the university has decided to prohibit men from one of the best jobs it has open at the moment: an associate professor of mechanical engineering.

The $186,045-a-year position has been reserved for women, including transgender women, under Queensland’s Anti-Discrimination Act, which allows discrimination if the intention is to reverse an existing bias to one group.

In this case, the group is men, who dominate the physical sciences, both as students and teachers. In UniSC’s School of Science, Engineering and Technology, some 20 of the 71 teaching staff are women, a ratio not uncommon in higher education.

“We see it as our responsibility to increase the number of visible role models for women, and this role was created to promote equal opportunity for women in mechanical engineering,” a university spokeswoman said.

Women and science

For decades, valiant attempts have been made to redress the imbalance. Much of the effort has focused on convincing young women to take up the sciences. Despite some progress, it has particularly struggled in engineering, where 84 per cent of the industry remains male.

In other parts of universities the campaign for sexual equality has been more successful, especially in law and the humanities. On some campuses, the movement has triumphed. This looks to be the case at UniSC, which opened 29 years ago and teaches 19,000 students over five campuses.

The university is run by vice-chancellor Helen Bartlett, a British-trained nurse who wrote a PhD on care in nursing homes. Sixty-one per cent of her board is female, as is 64 per cent of her professional staff and 69 per cent of the students. Staff have access 26 weeks’ parental leave and flexible working arrangements.

Universities have been run by men for a thousand years. A switch may be overdue. But could the way UniSC pursues equality harm its students, including women, by excluding qualified candidates to teach them?

James Allan, a University of Queensland law professor who promotes meritocratic policies in government and academia, said it was rare for a university to explicitly discriminate against men, although it frequently happened on an informal basis.

“The whole thing is laughable,” he said Thursday. “In the hard sciences, you definitely should not be picking anyone other than who is the best at the job.”

Studying elsewhere

This week, there are hundreds of academic job vacancies advertised at the universities of Queensland, Sydney, Melbourne, Tasmania, Adelaide and Western Australia, and the Australian National University. Not one is reserved for a particular sex.

All these universities are more attractive to students, particularly those seeking well-paid engineering careers. UniSC is the third-lowest ranked of 38 Australian universities, according to a Times Higher Education assessment published this week. Its mechanical engineering degree requires at tertiary entrance score of 60, which is about 10 percentage points below the Australian average.

As one of the bottom-draggers of the university industry, maybe the UniSC council should reconsider whether to put its social objectives ahead of attracting the best lecturers.