Chief Executive Update
Broadening the Society - a continuing journey
The Society is committed to morph itself so that over time participation within its membership and activities is broadly reflective of the composition of the people of Aotearoa New Zealand. There is serious work still to do, not the least because the participation of Māori and people of Pacific ethnicity in the research community is still very low, but also because the Society has historically appealed more to people from universities than from other types of research organisations. The early career cohort entering the research community these days is female-dominant, and in some fields, Māori and Pacific participation has improved but there is still much to do for the research community as a whole.
To map the Society’s progress, as a subset of the research community, we undertake an annual stocktake of who we are, and that for the year to 30 June 2020 has recently been released – so anyone can evaluate our progress. This year, we have introduced greater rigor into how we record and report data, with the intent of being able to report more comprehensively and accurately over time. I invite members to look at our recent report: Ko mātou tēnei.
Making improvement in the outcomes of the contestable processes we run requires continued attention to ensuring diverse fields of entrants. Looking across our recent suite of medal and award winners, it was pleasing to see good numbers of winners from Crown Research Institutes, a winning team from the private sector (Rocketlab), several Māori winners and to our best knowledge, the first winner from the polytechnic sector. Less visible was that the proportion of entrants who were female did drop slightly. Not unsurprisingly the proportion of female winners was down slightly as well (although the success rate for women entrants was higher than for male entrants). However, 2020 was still much better than even three years ago.
This can only reinforce to us all that unless the Society, and those who participate in our programmes, remain vigilant to ensure they continue to present people who are excellent but not necessarily like themselves, momentum can be lost. Believe it or not, nominations for our medals and awards open again early next year. Once again we will ask our members to identify and bring forward candidates who are both different and truly excellent.