Fuelling careers for researchers with care duties

Launched in 2019, the MJ Gething Gender Equity Award aims to address this issue by supporting early-career researchers in the biomedical sciences to care for family while also furthering their careers. The award is open to anyone with care-taking responsibilities, regardless of gender.

In 2024, six recipients benefited from this award to support their research profile and maintain momentum.

Receiving the MJ Gething Gender Equity Award helped Dr Christo to travel to Vancouver with her husband and then-eleven-month-old baby, Amelia, where she participated in the prestigious Keystone Symposia. For early-career researchers, networking opportunities like conferences are critical, enabling them to promote their work and establish the professional relationships that will help to propel their research findings into the next phase: translating them from the lab into real-world medical applications such as therapeutics.

Dr Christo says Keystone was one of the most important conferences in her career. “All of the leaders in my field attended and therefore my participation ensured my visibility on an international level that I would not have received elsewhere,” she says. “I was able to not only present my recent unpublished work, but I forged connections that may result in collaborations.

^{Mary-Jane Gething (centre right) with Dr Susan Christo, her daughter Amelia, and fellow MJ Gething Gender Equity Award recipients.}

“This experience would not have been possible without the generous support of the MJ Gething Gender Equity Award,” Dr Christo says. “I want to credit all the strong and powerful women before me who paved the way for establishing equality in the workplace.

Without the passion and vision of amazing women like Professor Gething, the opportunity to progress our research during motherhood would not exist.

A vision for intergenerational change

Mary-Jane Gething observed early on in her career, in the 1970s, that the few women who reached senior academic positions seemed to do so by remaining unmarried and not having children. She went on to achieve great success in her own career and became the first female Head of the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the University of Melbourne.

Together with her late husband, Professor Joseph Sambrook, she founded the Gething-Sambrook Family Foundation, which made the MJ Gething Gender Equity Award possible. In 2023 she received an Order of Australia for her significant contributions and service to biochemistry and molecular biology, to tertiary education, and to the arts.

“I want young women contemplating careers in STEM to have confidence that the research community is aware of gender inequity being a potential barrier to their success and is committed to its removal,” says Professor Gething.