In the middle of her honour’s year, having achieved high distinctions throughout a physics degree at the University of Sydney, Professor Tanya Monro decided to cast a wide net in choosing where to do her PhD. She met with a professor at a different university who was conducting research in an area she was excited by. After a cursory chat he said, “Tanya, this is a really, really hard field and I don’t think you’re the calibre of candidate that we’d take into the PhD program.”
It wasn’t until Monro was walking down the steps of that physics department, with tears running down her face, that she realised he hadn’t even looked at her CV. In fact, he had no idea of the calibre of student he was talking to. He had judged her ability to do a PhD in physics entirely on her gender.
“When I then won the Bragg Gold Medal for the best physics PhD in Australia, it was all my self-control not to come back to him and say, ‘Hey, do you remember me?’” Monro told the Brilliant. “The whole thing was just surreal and silly. But it’s just the tip of the iceberg, in terms of what people experience.”
Monro has gone on to build an extraordinary career. Since 2019, she has held the role of Australia’s Chief Defence Scientist, the first woman to take on the role. Prior to that, she was the Deputy Vice Chancellor of Research and Innovation at the University of South Australia.
Inclusive leadership
Although Monro agrees that her resilience and stubbornness have been critical in overcoming gender roadblocks, she thinks it’s counterproductive to require women to possess these qualities in order to succeed in science.
Ten years ago, while undertaking a personality-profiling activity as part of a senior leadership program with other academics and professional staff, Monro had a revelation. While the men in the group were fairly evenly distributed across personality types, the women were skewed towards a very particular personality type. She saw then that “talent wasn’t determining whether women stayed in the system and got to senior levels, but just sheer bloody-minded, resilient persistence was”.
Monro decided that part of her own measure of success of her leadership style would be in creating environments where all kinds of people can thrive.
If you still have environments where the majority of women don’t stay the course or choose to leave because of factors other than their ability to contribute, we’ve got a problem,” she says.
But how can someone effect that change in a male-dominated field such as defence science and technology?
While Monro has increased the number of women at a chief-division level from one to three out of nine, improving gender diversity across the group is more complex. In contrast to the characteristically high staff turnover rates of modern workplaces, there are many current employees in Defence Science and Technology Group who started as cadets or graduates 30, 40, or even 50 years ago.
“While that’s wonderful in terms of the corporate knowledge that they build up,” says Monro, “it also makes it incredibly difficult to change the demographics.”
Incredibly difficult, but not insurmountable. That’s why Monro has set a 40:40:20 gender ratio (40 women: 40 men: 20 open) for a new mid-career entry program called NAVIGATE.
“What I’ve learned from doing things previously that had a strong gender signal on the selection process is you tend to get more women to apply,” she says.
Trajectories, detours and pathways
It could have been so different for Monro. A talented cellist at an early age, she had her sights set on the Sydney Conservatorium High School. But her mother saw that the emphasis on music translated into a reduced school curriculum, and her daughter would not be able to study her other passion: science. “She said to me, ‘Tanya, you’re too young to narrow yourself and rule out science.’ It was the biggest trauma to hit my 11-year-old self, but I’m so grateful now,” says Monro.
Recently, Monro’s eldest son finished year 12, and Monro has been privy to many conversations with other parents about where their child is headed. It’s left her concerned that careers in STEM are viewed with a certain amount of distrust.
“It’s often not seen as a profession, and that’s why so many kids will go into medicine and law and do secondary degrees in other areas, simply because you don’t see a path,” she says. “And in many ways, I say embrace the uncertainty, because your kid could be creating new fields.”
“It’s a profession with a rich future that hasn’t been written yet. Your child will be in demand if they develop those skills,” Monro adds.
Monro’s path was to study photonics as part of her PhD – the science of light waves – and to become the inaugural director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Nanoscale Biophotonics (CNBP) in 2009, as well as the Institute for Photonics & Advanced Sensing. “What I love about photonics is the fact that you can ask crazy questions, come up with crazy new ideas and actually test them and see if they work,” she says. “You can do everything, from quite theoretical, conceptual work, right through to making a device.”
One of the first projects Monro worked on at the University of Adelaide, for example, was a problem brought to her by the Australian Department of Defence: could her team develop a class of optical fibres that could detect and measure corrosion in aircraft? Or, as Monro puts it: “whether we could essentially make smart structures that could send light scurrying through … to pick up early-stage aluminium corrosion, without having to pull apart key parts of the fuselage to see whether there was rust.”
Monro describes it as “an incredibly practical problem, but an incredibly difficult one”. By doing fundamental work, she and her team figured out how to guide light using optical fibres, without constraining it within the fibres. This formed the basis of new technology and fabrication techniques.
The impact didn’t stop there. A colleague asked if Monro could apply the same detection and measurement techniques using optical fibres to wine. This led to an ARC Linkage grant that developed “smart bungs” for wine barrels. Wine barrel stoppers, commonly referred to as ‘bungs’, were embedded with optical fibres that allowed wine samples to be extracted directly from the barrels, without the human contact, time and exposure that occur with existing testing methods.
“We realised that we could start to develop new tools for probing and measuring the cellular environment. That led to significant programs in the CNBP, including smart IVF incubators that can listen to developing embryos,” says Monro.
Bringing scientists with different expertise together to solve thorny issues gives Monro the greatest sense of satisfaction. In July this year the Australian Defence Science and Technology Summit is aiming to do this by bringing together people from across the research and innovation sector with a focus on resilience in our rapidly changing environment.
“You’ve got to invest in understanding each other’s ‘language’ and area of expertise,” she says. “You’ve got to be quite vulnerable, because when you become an expert in any field of science, you build the language, you build the credibility. And you’ve got to somehow go from that, to being able to ask the most basic questions of an expert in another field and say, ‘I don’t understand.’ Generally, scientists are uncomfortable in that space.”
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Article by Kylie Ahern
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