Entrepreneurial intentions of women

Despite advances in gender equity, evidence suggests that the level of business ownership by males continues to be significantly higher than that offemales. Moreover, females, from an early age, have lower entrepreneurial intentions than males. This paper examines previous studies to determine the factors that have been shown to relate to lower entrepreneurial intentions in women, to identify areas where prior research has been inadequate or inconclusive, and to discuss how intentions models might be modified to better explain the lower level of female business start-ups. It was found that the lower level of intentions is related to a range of personal background and attitudinal variables, and these factors are critically examined in this review. It is suggested that future research should focus on role models, networks and life roles in order to better explain female entrepreneurial intentions.

Evaluating equal employment opportunity and its impact on the increased participation of men and women in the transport industry

This paper seeks to identify the approaches undertaken in implementing equal employment opportunity in the transport industry in Australia and the links between these approaches and indicators of increased participation of women. This male dominated industry employs limited numbers of women with fewer numbers of women in management. The study analyses data from a unique set of equal opportunity progress reports from all organisations in the transport industry that are required to provide public reports under Australian legislation. The findings indicate a correlation between some approaches to equal opportunity and increased numbers of women in some areas. The study is equally remarkable for what it does not find. Despite widespread equal opportunity implementation across a broad number of employment measures there are limited measures that predict increases in the numbers of women in management or in non-traditional roles. This study differs from others in that it identifies issues specific to one industry and links organisational approach to equal opportunity with the employment status of both women and men.

'Getting a job' : Aborignal Women's issues and experiences in the health sector

Indigenous participation in employment has long been seen as an indicator of Indigenous economic participation in Australia. Researchers have linked participation in employment to improved health outcomes, increased education levels and greater self-esteem. There has been a dramatic increase in the number of Indigenous workforce policies and employment strategies as employers and industries attempt to employ more Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. Coupled with this has been a push to employ more Indigenous people in specific sectors to address the multiple layers of disadvantage experienced by Indigenous people, for example, the health sector. This paper draws on interview discussions with Aboriginal women in Rockhampton, Central Queensland, along with findings from the research of others to offer a greater understanding of the mixed benefits of increased Indigenous employment. What is demonstrated is that the nature of Indigenous employment is complex and not as simple as ‘just getting a job’.

Women's participation in the Australian Digital Content Industry : initial case study findings

An exploratory case study which seeks to understand better the problem of low participation rates of women in Information Communication Technology (ICT) is currently being conducted in Queensland, Australia. Contextualised within the Digital Content Industry (DCI) multimedia and games production sectors, the emphasis is on women employed as interactive content creators rather than as users of the technologies. Initial findings provide rich descriptive insights into the perceptions and experiences of female DCI professionals. Influences on participation such as: existing gender ratios, gender and occupational stereotypes, access into the industry and future parental responsibilities have emerged from the data. Bandura’s (1999) Social Cognitive Theory (SCT) is used as a “scaffold” (Walsham, 1995:76) to guide data analysis and assist analytic generalisation of the case study findings. We propose that the lens of human agency and theories such as SCT assist in explaining how influences are manifested and affect women’s agency and ultimately participation in the DCI. The Sphere of Influence conceptual model (Geneve et al, 2008), which emerges from the data and underpinning theory, is proposed as a heuristic framework to further explore influences on women’s participation in the DCI industry context.

There is nothing that 'identifies me to that place' : Aboriginal Women's perceptions of health spaces and places

There is a growing body of literature within social and cultural geography that explores notions of place, space, culture, race and identity. The more recent works suggest that places are experienced and understood in multiple ways and are embedded within an array of politics. Memmott and Long, who have undertaken place-based research with Australian Indigenous people, present the theoretical position that ‘place is made and takes on meaning through an interaction process involving mutual accommodation between people and the environment’. They outline that places and their cultural meanings are generated through one or a combination of three types of people–environment interactions. These include: a place that is created by altering the physical characteristics of a piece of environment and which might encompass a feature or features which are natural or made; a place that is created totally through behaviour that is carried out within a specific area, therefore that specific behaviour becomes connected to that specific place; and a place created by people moving or being moved from one environment to another and establishing a new place where boundaries are created and activities carried out. All these ideas of places are challenged and confirmed by what Indigenous women have said about their particular use of, and relationship with, space within several health services in Rockhampton, Central Queensland. As my title suggests, Indigenous women do not see themselves as ‘neutral’ or ‘non-racialised’ citizens who enter and ‘use’ a supposedly neutral health service. Instead, Aboriginal women demonstrate they are active recognisers of places that would identify them within the particular health place. That is, they as Aboriginal women didn’t just ‘make’ place, the places and spaces ‘make’ them. The health services were identified as sites within which spatial relations could begin to grow with recognition of themselves as Aboriginal women in place, or instead create a sense of marginality in the failure of the spaces to identify them. The women’s voices within this paper are drawn from interviews undertaken with twenty Aboriginal women in Rockhampton, Central Queensland, Australia, who participated in a research project exploring ‘how the relationship between health services and Aboriginal women can be more empowering from the viewpoints of Aboriginal women’. The assumption underpinning this study was that empowering and re-empowering practices for Aboriginal women can lead to improved health outcomes. Throughout the interviews women shared some of their lived realities including some of their thoughts on identity, the body, employment in the health sector, service delivery and their notions of health service spaces and places. Their thoughts on health service spaces and places provide an understanding of the lived reality for Aboriginal women and are explored and incorporated within this paper.

Research productivity levels of Chinese TEFL academics

Since China’s Economic Reform and its Open Door Policy, China has entered a new era of education (Adamson, 2002; Hu, 2005a). English has gained status as a language for international relations (Graddol, 1997) and international trade (Qu, 2007). Hence, in 2001, China’s Ministry of Education (MOE) required universities to offer 5-10% of their course units in English, particularly in the fields of information technology, biotechnology, finance and law (Jen, 2001; MOE, 2001). However, “the upgrading of national English proficiency, then, is predicted largely on the professional competence of the teaching force” (Hu, 2005b, p. 655). For TEFL academics, one component of this competence is the capacity to conduct research (Day, 1991; Shu, 2002). Indeed, research productivity has become essential for university success, and academics’ employment and promotional prospects. This study aims to investigate 182 Chinese TEFL academics’ research outputs across three Chinese higher education institutions through the research question: What are the research productivity levels of Chinese TEFL academics? A survey instrument was devised to gather TEFL academics’ calculations of research productivity and, in particular, the quality and quantity of research outputs over a five-year period (2004-2008). Descriptive statistics through SPSS were used to analyse data across research output fields (e.g., journal articles, conference papers). Academic status varied (n=182; teaching assistants 23.6%, lecturers 47.3%, associate professors 22.5%, and professors 6.6%) as did years of teaching (1-5 years 27.4%, 6-10 years 24.7%, 11-15 18.1%, 16-20 years 13.7%, > 21 years 15.9%). Results (n=182, male=27%, females=73%) indicated 18% had not produced any research in the five-year period. Indeed, more than 70% had produced no research in all categories except non-core journal articles and provincial projects. An overwhelming majority of TEFL academics had zero productivity in 10 of the 12 categories. Nevertheless, there were highly-productive TEFL academics, who had produced five or more pieces of research across the 12 categories. In addition, there was not much difference between sole and co-authored research outputs, except non-core journal articles where sole authored work was 20% higher than co-authored work. China’s desire for international competitiveness in education will require measures that facilitate higher levels of research productivity. These measures must include professional development, support and mentoring programs, and employment of personnel who can guide these processes. Research performance is an outcome, hence there is a need to understand Chinese TEFL academics’ perceptions about research, and experiences that may hinder and facilitate higher research productivity.

Sentencing Indigenous and Non-Indigenous Women in Western Australia’s Higher Courts

This article presents results from an exploratory study seeking to examine the role of sentencing in the continuing overrepresentation of Indigenous women in Western Australia’s prisons. Sentencing data from Western Australia’s higher courts indicate that Indigenous women were less likely than non-Indigenous women to be sentenced to a term of imprisonment when appearing before the court for comparable offending behaviour and histories.

Advancing e-learning policy and practice : influences on academics’ adoption, integration and development of multimodal e-learning courses

Tertiary education is increasingly a contested space where advances in Information Communications Technologies and their application to technology-mediated e-learning environments have forced university administrators and educators to dislocate themselves from traditional correspondence modes of student engagement. Compounding this paradigmatic shift within the traditional sphere of distance education pedagogy are multiple and conflicting pressures on academics to develop flexible, engaging, cost-effective and sustainable interactive learning resources that incorporate both multimedia and hypermedia. This chapter reports on a study that examined factors that influence educators’ decision to adopt and integrate educational technology and convert traditional print-based distance education materials into interactive multimodal e-learning formats. Although the broader study was conducted in a single Australian university and investigated pedagogical, institutional and individual factors, this chapter restricts its focus to solely the pedagogical motivations and concerns of educators. It is argued that findings from the study have significance at the institutional level, particularly in terms of developing an underlying pedagogical rationale that can permeate the e-learning culture throughout the university, while at the same time, providing a roadmap for educators who are yet to fully engage with the e-learning format.

Bringing academics on board : encouraging institution-wide diffusion of e-learning environments

Rapid advances in educational and information communications technology (ICT)have encouraged some educators to move beyond traditional face to face and distance education correspondence modes toward a rich, technology mediated e-learning environment. Ready access to multimedia at the desktop has provided the opportunity for educators to develop flexible, engaging and interactive learning resources incorporating multimedia and hypermedia. However, despite this opportunity, the adoption and integration of educational technologies by academics across the tertiary sector has typically been slow. This paper presents the findings of a qualitative study that investigated factors influencing the manner in which academics adopt and integrate educational technology and ICT. The research was conducted at a regional Australian university, the University of Southern Queensland (USQ), and focused on the development of e-learning environments. These e-learning environments include a range of multimodal learning objects and multiple representations of content that seek to cater for different learning styles and modal preferences, increase interaction, improve learning outcomes, provide a more inclusive and equitable curriculum and more closely mirror the on campus learning experience. This focus of this paper is primarily on the barriers or inhibitors academics reported in the study, including institutional barriers, individual inhibitors and pedagogical concerns. Strategies for addressing these obstacles are presented and implications and recommendations for educational institutions are discussed.

Patriarchal whiteness, self-determination and Indigenous women : the invisibilty of structural priviledge and the visability of oppression

Indigenous self-determination is the recognised right of all peoples to freely determine their political status, and pursue their economic, social and cultural development. Unfinished Constitutional Business? offers fresh insights into the ways communities can chart their own course and realise self-determination. Because the history of colonisation is emotionally charged, the issue has been clouded by a rhetoric that has sometimes obstructed analysis.

Researching whiteness : some reflections from an Indigenous woman's standpoint

Discusses how she experienced research processes as a way of opening up a dialogue about racial inter-subjective relations in feminist research, in order to use the process as a means of enabling greater understanding on how race and whiteness work. She explores some of the contradictions and ambiguities that arose from feminism, and argues that feminism is the outcome of the operations of racialized and gendered social relations. Moreover, she opines that as researchers of whiteness, indigenous and white women need to be conscious of feminist academics and need to unmask it in the process of developing methodologies to be better equipped to critique patriarchal whiteness

When the object speaks, a postcolonial encounter : anthropological, representations and Aboriginal's women's self-presentations

As an Aboriginal woman currently reviewing feminist literature in Australia, I have found that representations of Aboriginal women's gender have been generated predominantly by women anthropologists. Australian feminists utilise this literature in their writing and teaching and accept its truths without question; the most often quoted ethnographic text is Diane Bell's Daughters of the Dreaming (1983a).1 Feminists' lack of critical engagement with this literature implies that they are content to accept women anthropologists' representations because Aboriginal women are not central to their constructions of feminism.2 Instead the Aboriginal woman is positioned on the margins, a symbol of difference; a reminder that it is feminists who are the bearers of true womanhood.