The fifth goal is Gender Equality - specifically, achieving "gender equality and empower all women and girls". It has been measurably shown that improving the health, education and employment of women and girls has a flow on effect that improves the entire society. If you want to improve the quality of life in a given community, send the girls to school.
For this week's showcase on JCU research and UN SDGs, we'd like to highlight a recent publication by three JCU lectures and researchers in collaboration with a researcher from ANU:
Re-engineering the "leaky pipeline" metaphor: diversifying the pool by teaching STEM "by stealth", by Theresa Petray, Tanya Doyle, Ryl Harrison, Elise Howard, and Rhian Morgan.
This article explores the way girls may not see themselves as being candidates for STEM courses because the "pipeline" concept of funnelling students towards STEM education doesn't allow for a diverse range of students with wide interests. By stepping aside from the idea that you chose STEM as opposed to creativity and the arts, and moving towards the idea that STEM careers can pull from people with a diverse range of interests, girls who identify HASS subjects as their favourite subjects in school can still be engaged in STEM programmes and encouraged to learn STEM subjects. It uses the "She Flies" camps, which taught girls how to programme and fly drones, to explore this concept.
This is one of many research papers we have in Research Online dealing with Gender equality. A search for the keyword "Gender" will bring up over 200 articles, dealing with aspects such as health, social equity, education, technology, media...
It's a wide and varied topic, and one which has the potential to make a big impact on society.
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