Dr Beth Fulton is a senior research fellow at CSIRO and the developer of Atlantis, an ecosystem-modelling program evaluated as world’s best by the FAO. Atlantis has been applied to over 15 ecosystems in Australia and the US, and in 2007, Dr Fulton won the Science Minister’s Prize for Life Scientist of the Year.
Her excellence has encouraged invitations to high-level scientific meetings and has exposed to her different managerial facets of her male-dominated discipline.
It is experience which has allowed her to contribute the female perspective as a valuable alternative in decision-making, and to learn how to manage differences in communication style between men and women.
Here, she has been kind enough to share her observations with us.
“When I’m in a room with ecologists, there’s often as many women as men, but in senior research meetings, or mathematical meetings, or industry meetings, I’m pretty much still the only woman in the room.
“You play it by ear. Don’t go in and shout the fact that you’re female. Many times you can get along way by playing down the fact that you’re female.
“Be prepared for aggression. Men just tend to be more aggressive and loud, so you have to be prepared not to take some of their comments personally. Just think about what it means for the science, rather than how they may have phrased things differently to how you’d do it.
“But you don’t have to give up being a woman either. You almost keep it as your trump card.
“When they’ve had their say and you’ve just flown under the radar, it doesn’t hurt occasionally to say, ‘Well, the different perspective on that is …’ – and sometimes that will be because you’re younger, or you’ve had a different background, and if that’s the reason then you’re clear about that.
“But if it’s because you’re a woman that you’ve got a different perspective – particularly when you get to social and economic circumstances – it doesn’t hurt then to say, ‘Well no, that’s not the only perspective’.
“You’re not loud and abrasive, or ultra-feminist from the get-go, but you don’t become the completely, shy-retiring violet type either. It’s a happy medium and you do as appropriate to the moment. “
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