Curtin University is one of 42 universities in Australia. It is a public university located in Perth – the city where I reside. Total student enrolment at Curtin University is approximately 60,000.
Earlier this year, Curtin University advertised a job titled STEM Outreach Officer. According to the job advertisement:
“The Faculty of Science and Engineering at Curtin University is excited to be expanding the Girls Engineering Tomorrow program, and we are looking for a dedicated and passionate STEM Outreach Officer to join our team and help inspire the next generation of STEM superstars! This role is all about connecting and empowering girls and non-binary students in their early high school years and inspiring them to explore study and career pathways in STEM disciplines, particularly engineering.”
In the advertisement, the university listed responsibilities of the prospective STEM Outreach Officer. Some of these responsibilities include:
• “Assisting with the delivery of the Girls Engineering Tomorrow program…”
• “Mentoring students, advocating for gender equity in STEM and inspiring future STEM superstars.”
• “Promoting STEM pathways for school-aged students, particularly girls, through outreach initiatives.”
In the advertisement, the university states that to be hired for the position the applicant must have a “strong commitment to gender equity and creating equal opportunities for all students in STEM.”
Sex discrimination
The purpose of the STEM Outreach Officer at Curtin University is to increase the number of students of only one sex: females. Curtin University does not appear to have positions or initiatives dedicated to increasing the number of male students in programs where men are fewer in number, such as psychology, education, nursing, and occupational therapy. Therefore, Curtin University is engaging in sex discrimination.
When I posted about this discrimination on X, an astute follower responded with a link to the website of Curtin University’s Gender Equity and Inclusion team. According to the team’s website, their mission is to “build and nurture inclusive, socially just, culturally responsive and safe values driven communities within the University.” An additional aim of the team is said to be to “eliminate gender-based discrimination and identify and challenge cultural, social and institutional norms and barriers to achieving gender equity.”
According to the website, the leads of the team are Associate Professor Samantha Owen and Ms. Elizabeth Baca, and they are advised by a group of individuals who are shown in the photograph below. This advisory group appears to consist of 10 women and one token male ally.
Ironically, the university’s Gender Equity and Inclusion team states that one of its aims is to “eliminate gender-based discrimination.” Yet, the team, and the university more broadly, regularly engages in gender-based discrimination against men. The STEM Outreach Officer embodies such discrimination. What’s more, Curtin University already enrols significantly more female than male students. As shown below in the university’s publicly available data table, there were 34,987 female students enrolled at Curtin University in 2023 compared to 25,910 male students.
The data from 2023 are not an aberration. As the data table shows, each year between 2019 and 2023, there were 7,000 – 10,000 fewer men than women enrolled at Curtin University. Over this five-year period, the number of male students enrolled was fairly constant, whereas the number of female students steadily increased. The STEM Outreach Officer will cause the size of this sex difference to widen further.
Curtin University’s lack of explicit interest in male students is not new. Followers of The Nuzzo Letter might recall my piece from September 2023 titled, “Australian research grant for equity in higher education ignores men.” In the piece, I discussed a call for grant applications advertised by Curtin University’s National Centre for Student Equity in Higher Education. Recipients of the competitive grants could use the funds to “address equity issues across the entire higher education student lifecycle.” However, projects that received funds were to target at least one of six target groups. One of the target groups was “women in non-traditional areas” (code for women in STEM). Neither men in non-traditional areas nor men broadly speaking were considered a target group, though men comprise 42% of the student body at Curtin.
So much for “gender equity.”
Shaming Curtin University for its selective equity
In 2024, there was a campaign in Australia, organized by the federal government’s gynocentric Workplace Gender Equality Agency, to publicly shame Australian businesses who had the highest “gender pay gaps.” This shaming appeared in pieces published at major news outlets including The Guardian, Australia’s ABC News, and The Western Australian.
If, by the gynocentrist’s own standard, shaming is an acceptable strategy for inducing societal change, then perhaps it is time to give them a taste of their own medicine. Perhaps universities that institutionalize discriminatory “gender equity” practices, and express little interest in men, should be publicly shamed for their biases. During this process, Curtin University would be called out for its philosophical inconsistency, when it says that the STEM Outreach Office will be “committed to gender equity and creating equal opportunities for all students.”
Equity and equal opportunity are incompatible. They reflect two different beliefs about how humans ought to be treated. Equal opportunity, which is already enshrined in Australian law, says that all persons are to be treated the same under the law. Equity, on the other hand, says that equal opportunity laws and policies should be circumvented to achieve equal results between demographic groups via social engineering.
Curtin University clearly does not fully embrace equal opportunity yet saying that is a stalwart of equity is also somewhat misleading. Curtin University is not trying to achieve equity full stop. Curtin University, like many other universities in Australia, is instituting selective equity. Its policies and initiatives are aimed at improving results for specific groups of people, namely any group that is not white heterosexual men.
Little evidence exists to suggest that once equity proponents achieve their aims of equal outcomes that they will stop the momentum associated with their unidirectional reshaping of society. If equality of outcome were indeed the true guiding principle of the equity movement, then institutions like Curtin University would take action to increase male enrolments. But the equity and inclusion apparatchik do not do that because their aims are to dismantle laws, rules, and traditions; make themselves look and feel important; and gain as much power as possible.
Conclusion
In conclusion, Curtin University is engaging in sex discrimination. It is purposely recruiting female students and not male students, and this is occurring over a consistent backdrop of approximately 10,000 fewer male than female enrolments each year. To my knowledge, no initiatives exist at Curtin University for attempting to increase the size of its male student body.
One might think that some man in the Curtin University professoriate or administrative hierarchy – such as the token male on the Gender Equity and Inclusion committee – might say something about the university’s biased and unethical behavior.
You might think that such a man would tell the university that they could simply take the excessive $85,000 salary for the STEM Outreach Officer and divvy it out each year in the form of student scholarships, which would incentive enrolment of talented students who are in financial need, including the female students who the University so desperately wants to enrol.
You might also think that such a man would speak up on behalf of himself and the boys and men in his life.
Unfortunately, this is not happening, nor should we expect it to happen given the trace amounts of masculinity remaining on Australia’s university campuses.
Token males on university gender equity committees are not there to say anything meaningful about men’s educational outcomes or to question their universities’ obsessive gynocentric policies. Men like this have already been castrated (figuratively speaking). They are dedicated allies to the matriarchal university.
Suggested Citation
Nuzzo JL. Gender Equity at Curtin University. The Nuzzo Letter. January 21, 2025.
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