Abstract
Although the participation of women within the science, technology, engineering and mathematics workforces has been widely discussed over recent decades, the recording and analysis of data pertaining to the gender balance of medical physicists in Australia and New Zealand remains rare. This study aimed to provide a baseline for evaluating future changes in workforce demographics by quantifying the current level of representation of women in the Australasian medical physics workforce and providing an indication of the relative contribution made by those women to the local research environment. The 2015 Australasian College of Physical Scientists and Engineers in Medicine (ACPSEM) member directory and list of chief physicists at ACPSEM-accredited radiation oncology and diagnostic imaging training centres were interrogated to identify the gender balance of medical physicists working in Australia and New Zealand. A specific investigation of the employment levels of all medical physicists in Queensland was undertaken to provide an example of the gender balance at different levels of seniority in one large Australian state. Lists of authors of medical physics presentations at ACPSEM annual conferences and authors of publications in the ACPSEM’s official journal, were used to provide an indication of the gender balance in published research within Australia and New Zealand. The results of this study showed that women currently constitute approximately 28 % of the medical physics workforce in Australia and New Zealand, distributed disproportionally in junior roles; there is a decrease in female participation in the field with increasing levels of seniority, which is particularly apparent in the stratified data obtained for the Queensland workforce. Comparisons with older data suggest that this situation has changed little since 2008. Examination of ACPSEM conference presentations suggested that there are similar disparities between the gender-balance of proffered and invited or keynote speakers (28 % and 13 % from female authors) and the gender balance of certified and chief physicists (28 % and 21 % female). The representation of women in the ACPSEM journal does not differ substantially between authorship of proffered versus invited work (22 % and 19 % from female authors). While this work was limited to evaluating the membership, annual conference and official journal of the ACPSEM (rather than evaluating the entire medical physics workforce and the contributions of male and female physicists to international conferences and publications), this study nonetheless led to the following recommendations: that a longitudinal study analysing correlations between age, period of service, seniority and gender should be undertaken and that future ACPSEM workforce surveys should include analyses of gender representation.
Notes
Certification pathways include the ACPSEM training and education program (TEAP), for those entering the profession, and examination for experienced physicists (having commenced employment before 2006 in radiation oncology, or 2011 for radiology and nuclear medicine).
References
Bell S (2009) Women in science in Australia: maximising productivity, diversity and innovation. Report prepared for Federation of Australian Scientific and Technological Societies
Australian Academy of Science (2015) Science in Australia Gender Equity (SAGE) Pilot. Accessed online at https://www.science.org.au/SAGE/Pilot
Tsapaki V, Rehani MM (2015) Female medical physicists: the results of a survey carried out by the International Organization for Medical Physics. Physica Medica 31:368–373
Health Consult (2009) Radiation oncology workforce planning. Final report for Department of Health and Ageing
Round WH (2007) A survey of the Australasian clinical medical physics and biomedical engineering workforce. Australas Phys Eng Sci Med 30(1):13–24
Round WH (2010) A 2009 survey of the Australasian clinical medical physics and biomedical engineering workforce. Australas Phys Eng Sci Med 33(2):153–162
Round WH (2013) A 2012 survey of the Australasian clinical medical physics and biomedical engineering workforce. Australas Phys Eng Sci Med 36(2):147–157
Leung J, Vukolova N (2011) Faculty of radiation oncology 2010 workforce survey. J Med Imaging Radiat Oncol 55:622–632
White K (2004) The leaking pipeline: women postgraduate and early career researchers in Australia. Tert Educ Manag 10(3):227–241
Department of Education, Australia (2012) Higher education research data collection 2012
Fox MF (2005) Gender, family characteristics, and publication productivity among scientists. Soc Stud Sci 35(1):131–150
Women in Science, Engineering and Technology Advisory Group (1995) Women in Science. Engineering and Technology
Association for Women in the Sciences (2011) Women in science: a 2011 snapshot
Saxena A (2014) Workforce diversity: a key to improve productivity. Procedia Econ Financ 11:76–85
Strachan G, Broadbent K, Whitehouse G, Peetz D, Bailey J (2011) Looking for women in Australian universities. Res Dev High Educ 34:308–319
Acknowledgments
The authors wish to thank Geoff Barbaro, Eva Bezak, Diana Binny, Kurt Byrnes, Paul Charles, Louis Fourie, Emma Inness, John Kenny, Craig Lancaster, Tim Markwell, Johnny Morales and Steven Sylvander for valuable information and advice.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Conflict of interest
SBC is an member of the ACPSEM (from 2013) and a member of the Queensland branch committee (from 2014). TK is a member of the ACPSEM (from 2013, associate member from 2008), a past member of the Queensland branch committee (2012–2014), an associate editor of APESM (from 2010), and was chair of the EPSM 2012 scientific programme.
Additional information
Parts of this work were presented at the Engineering and Physical Sciences in Medicine Conference, Wellington, 2015.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Crowe, S.B., Kairn, T. Women in medical physics: a preliminary analysis of workforce and research participation in Australia and New Zealand. Australas Phys Eng Sci Med 39, 525–532 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13246-016-0428-z
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13246-016-0428-z