International Women's Day - March forward for all women and girls

This International Women's Day, the CSER Team continues its commitment to inspire, educate and celebrate women and girls.

The theme 'March Forward for All Women and Girls' has never been so important. Targets provide a focus but action and tangible results takes time and resourcing. UN Women Australia have noted that 30 years ago the world committed to a bold vision for gender equality through the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action.

Since then, we’ve seen women break barriers, reshape policies, and ignite global movements. Yet, despite significant progress, the promises made remain largely unfulfilled for millions of women worldwide. We are simply not where we should be. It’s time to turn promises into progress.UN Women Australia, https://www.iwd.net.au/

Educators play a significant role in showcasing to our young people the possibilities before them. The CSER Team have worked with Refraction Media's Careers with STEM Team to produce a series of Career Profiles which showcase amazing women across many industries breaking down barriers, leading the way in innovation to solve real world problems. 

For example, Dr Menasha Thilakaratne is an AI Whisperer! Using her expertise in Natural Language Processing (NLP), Menasha helps industries 'access information faster, program chatbots to answer questions, make appointments and give people tips. Menasha is always striving to work harder for her students and learning new ways to solve problems.'

Chantelle Murray is Ngurrara women ranger coordinator for the Kimberley Land Council. Her job includes fire management, plant and animal surveying and teaching traditional languages. A big part of her work is mixing traditional knowledge with Western science to take care of 77,000 square kilometres of country. This includes everything from feral animal management to protecting biodiversity.

Vanessa Pirotti is a Wildlife Scientist with a background in marine biology. Vanessa knows a lot about whales and what their mucous can tell us about their health! Using Artificial Intelligence she is helping to catch illegally smuggled wildlife in luggage and mail.

Food Defender, Anastasia Volkova is an aerospace engineer and coder. Anastasia founded a tech company 'Regrow' to support farmers manage their crops. Using information from satellites her company is able to inform farmers of environmental, weather and climate conditions to support adaptations to food production processes and deal with drought, fires and floods. Regrow enables Anastasia to live out her passion about ensuring we make the most of the land we already use for growing food in order to conserve the land already preserved for nature.

You can find more on each of these inspiring women and other career profiles in the Digital Technologies + X course. The profiles are designed to appeal to Primary Years students to showcase the variety of opportunities in STEM for all students. 

Quality resources like the Girls In STEM Toolkit provide excellent resources to support girls' confidence, particularly in STEM. 

Having recently participated in the Girls Day in Tech event at St Peter's Girls School, with over 200 Year 5 and Year 6 girls from across local Adelaide schools, it is evident that there is great enthusiasm from our young people to be active leaders now and into the future. 

Happy International Women's Day. Thanks for all you do to support your students!