Two things impressed me about Professor Elanor Huntington at the “Career Strategies for Women in STEM fields” hosted by HunterWise and The Faculty of Engineering and Built Environment at UON last Friday 5 July.
Firstly, Professor Huntington is a woman who knows who she is and secondly she is passionate about supporting all the stakeholders in academia to make positive change.
Professor Huntington came across to me as a woman who ponders deeply and reflects on her role in life, how she responds to those around her and someone who leads from a place of personal power. Her manner is easy, open, honest and authentic and there is a sense of "this is who I am".
Right up front she talked about understanding enough about herself to know that she is an introvert – “energy comes from inside” and shy – “fear of rejection” and tells us stories of how this played out in her career and the level of self-care that was required to support herself along the way.
Having “drifted into science” because she was “good at it” and had “no burning desire” to do anything else at the time, Professor Huntington has a lot of firsts under her proverbial belt. The most recent of which is the first female Dean of the College of Engineering and Computer Science (CECS) at ANU, explaining that taking on this role has been the second most ”transformational experience” in her career.
The first being when she was asked to step up into a higher role at another institution. In the context of her talk, I interpreted transformational to mean experiences that stretch one beyond the current understanding of what one might have of oneself to be capable. When asked why she declined (3 times before she was told it was not a request) to take the role Professor Huntington replied: “It seemed like too big of a step from where I was at the time” and went on to say that finally taking the position turned out to be a “transformational four years”. Evidently Professor Huntington has surrounded herself with people that have “supported me to be me” and admits that gender was never a real issue for her in her career, going on to say that she has no lived experience of having a female boss or having to cope with being a parent whilst building her career.
What she did say was that there a plenty of good men out there who are just blissfully unaware of the challenges of women and that they are the ones we need to bring along to these types of talks. It was at that point, one of the only men in the room piped up and said that he was one of those men. His personal experience had been that women were just naturally successful because his wife, mother and sister are all successful women. It wasn’t even on his radar to know that some women struggle building careers because of a myriad of issues that impact them along the way. Now that he understands this he is a huge and active advocate for supporting women in STEM careers.
“Building a career” is loosely fitting when it comes to Professor Huntington’s career. She “drifted into science” even after been told by a careers advisor at school not to bother with math or engineering and to go and study anthropology instead (a clear example of cognitive bias in the aptitude testing in the 1980/90’s). Rather Professor Huntington said her career success could be partly attributed to the fact that she “kept doing things that seemed to me to be important to do” and that she had never targeted climbing the academic “greasy” pole and had not intentionally set out to accumulate “badges”.
She did admit that as an up and coming engineer she often has had to find unique ways to operate in the system and now that she had her current position she could “bend the world around her”. This came across from a personal space of power with, rather than power over others to make change.
So what were the clues to know that Professor Huntington knows who she is? Using the words and “transformational”, “aware”, “supported to be me”, and understanding how being “shy and introvert” works for her and doesn’t work for her are clues that Professor Huntington knows who she is. To be able to Mind Your Language is an important aspect of creating success in your life.
Secondly, Professor Huntington is passionate about academia, students and industry and how, in her opinion, academia in general is on the verge of having a Kodak moment , losing touch with the needs of students and industry who are hiring the students. At the ANU, Professor Elanor Huntington is leading a project to reimagine a new type of engineering and computing, one that is custom built and fit for the middle of the 21st century.
All in all a very insightful couple of hours spent in the company of interesting and inspiring people.
The key Career Strategies for Women in STEM fields that I learned from Professor Huntington are: