Women historians smashed the glass ceiling in Australia

...Since the 1970s, the profession has become conspicuous for the number of women in its ranks and the widespread acceptance of feminist scholarship. Compared to both the male-dominated STEM disciplines, and other social sciences like philosophy and political science, Australian history has been remarkably feminised.

This was the conclusion of a recent ANU enquiry into the status of gender in the social sciences. The results, published in 2014, found that history was “the discipline most changed by feminist scholarship.” When it came to “improving the participation of women” and “mainstreaming feminist approaches and gender scholarship,” history departments were judged “impressively successful.”

The Australian Historical Association leadership is symptomatic of this broader trend. The current president, vice president and the two immediate past presidents are all female. This is not a recent phenomenon: women have sat at the helm of the Association for 14 of the past 20 years.

Women also fare well when it comes to funding from the Australian Research Council. Of the nine Discovery Early Career Researcher Awards granted to history in 2016, five were secured by women. And of the 23 history Discovery projects funded in the latest round, 16 have female Chief Investigators.

These statistics are reflected in who gets published. Over the five-year window from 2012-16, 62.5% of research articles published in the journal Australian Historical Studies had a female author. The same is true of History Australia, where 56.5% of authors were women.

History also has a relatively high number of female Fellows of the Australian Academy of Social Sciences. At present, 38.5% of history fellows are women. This is in contrast to philosophy (23%), political science (26%), education (20%) and economics (10%). Of the major social science disciplines, only sociology (42.5% female) can boast a more impressive gender ratio. ...