LITMIR.BIZ

      As I mentioned earlier, I love teaching and have always looked for part-time opportunities. One of my most pleasant assignments was to be invited by the Mackay High School to give a series of lessons to some problem Grade 8 children who were very intelligent buy failing. As an experiment, the group of boys and girls was taken out of normal classes for some weeks and three or four outsiders like myself, were invited to spend time with the kids in any way we pleased. I chose to introduce them to formal logic and some of the classic problems which have puzzled philosophers and engineers for thousands of years. They responded incredibly to the challenge and for a short time stopped being problems exhibiting instead their natural intelligence and superior abilities.

      For many years I taught part-time at the Mackay College of TAFE, in particular at the Sugar School where shift engineers and shift chemists are trained for the sugar industry. Although girls were accepted for the shift chemist’s course, the school’s prospectus stated that they would find employment only as laboratory assistants, not as shift chemists. To my surprise, the battle I fought to change the prospectus was long and bitter, even though the wording in it was illegal. Eventually the discriminatory language was removed, but to my knowledge the industry still shies away from female chemists and engineers in positions of authority.

      Again it was quite acceptable for me to be in the team setting up the engineers’ course for the Sugar School and for me to teach the future male shift engineers, but girls were not permitted to enter the engineering course.

      I rarely become involved in women’s issues and I am wary of some of the excesses of the feminist movement. For myself, I have managed to do anything I pleased simply by going ahead and doing it and take no notice of anyone who said I couldn’t. If I have any influence, it will be from example, not from oratory or from joining movements.

      However I will fight tooth and nail to keep all doors open for both men and women, especially educational door. Once there is no bar on women entering a course or profession, I feel no further need for artificial encouragement, for affirmative action or for redressing the balance. From personal experience I know that thumbing your nose at the prevailing attitudes of the society in which you live is very likely to lead to loneliness and unhappiness. How silly and potentially dangerous to push young girls into engineering courses as many universities do, simply because the government wants to improve the statistics (and provides funds to do so), without some accompanying discussion on the realities of engineering working environments.

      Simply open the doors. If girls want to walk in, they will. If they don’t want to walk in, they must not be pushed.

      In early 1985 I sought an appointment with the Dean of Engineering at the Queensland Institute of Technology because I wanted to tackle him about his newspaper advertisements trying to attract women into engineering courses. Advertisements for male students always show male engineers in white shirts and ties in clean offices, but the new advertisements showed a girl in a hard hat. Why? We argued for some time and then I ended up with a job as tutor which later extended to lecturing in electrical engineering. Towards the end of the following years left to found Mosaic Electronics. Since then I’ve lectured part-time at QUT in 1990 and at Griffith University in 1991.

      Now I have an appointment as fractional senior lecturer in the department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Queensland and expect to stay with this department for some time.