Margaret Gardner on getting more women into leadership positions

Monash Business School’s new podcast series, Thought Capital, features Monash vice-chancellor Margaret Gardner on women in leadership in its first episode.

Monash University vice-chanceller Margaret Gardner being interviewed for a Women in Leadership podcast by Michael Pascoe

In today’s Higher Ed Daily Brief: women in leadership, help for rural students

Powerful women

Monash Business School is launching a new podcast series, Thought Capital, and first up is an episode in which Monash University vice-chancellor Margaret Gardner and economics professor Lata Gangadharan talk about how to help get more women into leadership roles.

Professor Gardner tells interviewer Michael Pascoe that the journey toward gender equality has been much slower than she expected to occur when she was an undergraduate.

Professor Gangadharan describes her research, saying that one real world experiment she has done shows that the gender gap between women and men in executive positions disappears when, instead of people having to “opt-in” to apply for a senior job, they are automatically considered unless they “opt-out”.

Professor Gardner says in the podcast that she was never someone who sought to be a leader, particularly not when she was at school. “The point at which I imagined being the vice-chancellor was the point at which I was already holding a senior executive job reporting to a vice-chancellor,” she said.

The podcast is available https://www2.monash.edu/impact/podcasts/thought-capital/

Scholarship guide

The 2019 scholarships guide from the Country Education Foundation (CEF) is out, aimed at helping young people from rural and regional Australia to find scholarships, grants and bursaries.

“There are hundreds of thousands of dollars in scholarships up for grabs but knowing where to look and how to apply is a big hurdle for school leavers, especially regional students who don’t have easy access to information about tertiary institutions,” the CEF says.

It produced the guide in partnership with the University of Sydney. It includes scholarships from universities all over Australia. It can be found at www.cef.org.au/scholarships-guide