All right, and rolling.
What STEM-related opportunities were available to you when you were my age?
There was never anybody who said, "Oh, you can't do physics.
You're are a girl."
I noticed that there was something not quite as I expected when I took the subjects between
16 and 18 because my class was full of boys, and there were two girls.
Oh, really?
That was the first time that I noticed, oh, it's not even numbers as it had been prior
to that.
With jobs, if I wanted to go any higher, I soon realised that there were not many women
in those roles, so there were probably lots of messages to my unconscious mind at that
time that I could do it, but only to a certain level.
Looking at your experience and industry, what changes have you seen, if any?
There's more women.
Yeah.
There's more women that I'm shoulder to shoulder with.
There are more women in management positions, so I can look up and see, "Ah, I can get there."
In a lot of the outreach that I've done, I've spoken with school-age children and, particularly,
girls, and some have said that they've been under a lot of pressure from their female
friends not to study STEM subjects because they're not cool or it's not what-
Oh, really?
It's not what girls do.
Have you experienced any of that at school or with your friends?
I do have a good group of friends, and I feel a lot of them, too, are interested in the
sciences, but ...
Great.
... a fair ... a lot of them also have other interests, too, but it doesn't really matter
because everything is ... whatever you want to do.
I guess something else I'd love to ask is what are you excited about for the future?
Last year, I was appointed in the department of physics, and I was the first woman, the
first academic female in 2017, and these things, these statistics still exists in many places
around the world.
There are still conferences with all-male speaker lineups.
These are the things I want to change, and the more women I have coming up through the
ranks, the more choice I'll have.
What advice do you have for me when I'm talking to 16-year-old girls about encouraging them
to go into STEM subjects?
Sharing your experiences, especially how you began.
That's always ...
Okay.
That's something that I always found very valuable especially when I was in America
and I heard all these amazing people talking.
They talked about their life journeys from like the very beginning.
They basically talked about those deciding moments ...
Okay.
... that really kicked them off into whatever path they went into and just how they ... yeah,
the opportunities and how they really grabbed a hold of those opportunities, and I think
touching on the mentoring part, I think that is something.
It's a very generous act and it's very, very helpful to young girls.
Is it your plan to go to university?
I think I will be a lifelong learner, so university definitely seems like the place to go, and
I guess we'll see where it goes from there.
Are you thinking of taking a STEM subject?
Definitely.
I think STEM is where you get the answers and where you find more questions, and it's
just ... I think it's a very fulfilling place to be, so I would like to have a career in
that.
Great.
You're really great to have you on board.
Thank you.