+ Patent & Trade Marks Attorney
+ Physical & Inorganic Chemist
+ Chef Extraordinaire
What drew you to study STEM?
My high school encouraged anyone, regardless of gender, who was bright and capable to do STEM subjects. English was actually my best subject at the time but my final Year 12 studies were very STEM heavy: Maths I, Maths II, Physics, Chemistry and English. After Year 12 I enrolled in a science degree because at that stage, I didn’t know what I wanted to do, and I thought by studying a general science degree, I would keep my options open and discover a pathway through the university journey.
The year that I enrolled in my science degree, the University of Adelaide was celebrating the centenary of the first woman to graduate from the University of Adelaide with a science degree. So they had a good track record of encouraging women in science. At the time there seemed to be as many female students enrolled in science degrees as there were males, except for engineering, where women only made up 10%. Because I shared a lot of those courses, I was one of the few women doing physics and applied maths.
I discovered a real enjoyment for chemistry, especially the practical side of things. It was a great foundation subject for understanding how the world worked.
Was working in IP always part of your career plan, or was it something that presented to you during your journey?
No. Once I had completed my three-year science degree, my marks were high enough for me to do an honours degree. I topped the honours year and won the prize for top honours students in chemistry. By that stage, I wanted to work in research. So my career path was carefully structured to eventually take up a lectureship position in chemistry at a university, somewhere in Australia. I completed my PhD and the next obvious step was to do a post-doctoral fellowship overseas. All of the PhD students in our cohort completed their PhD and went to the U.S., Canada, Germany, Switzerland, France or the UK to do two or three years post-doc experience, maybe do a second post-doc and then come back to Australia and take up a research fellowship and then a lectureship position.
I spent three years working at the University of Warwick’s Chemistry department, which was a great chemistry department with significant industry-academic collaboration, much more so than I’d experienced here in Australia. I came back to Australia and took up a research fellowship at Murdoch University, working on alumina chemistry, and then started looking for lectureship positions. At that stage, government funding had fallen away from pure science departments at universities and no suitable positions were available at the time. It was at that point that I started looking to find an alternative career path. So I really fell into the patent attorney profession. It hadn’t been part of the plan.
Were you aware of what IP was and how that would work with your studies? Or was it something that was unknown to you?
IP was pretty much an unknown. I remember seeing a notice on the board of the chemistry department at the University of Adelaide that was advertising for patent examiners in Canberra. Intellectual property wasn’t discussed at all during my studies. I was aware of the University of Adelaide filing patent applications, they had a couple of spin-out companies in the fields of biochemistry and genetics, where they were very strong at that time, and they were commercialising technology that had been developed within those departments. But I didn’t understand anything about patents.
So it was a real leap of faith when I started in the profession. But I loved it right away. I just feel so fortunate to be working in this field.
Which women leaders did you look up to as you were growing up and why?
I had some very strong women in my family, my mother, my grandmother and her sisters. They influenced me to be independent and to be able to support myself and my family if need be. My mother was widowed at a very early age, 32, with three small boys to look after. Two years later she met my father, married him and had two girls; myself and my sister. She brought us up, my sister and I, so that we would be able to be independent; financially independent with our own career. She didn’t want to see her daughters in the same situation as she’d been at 32, with no skills, no training, no education, no means of supporting the family and completely reliant on somebody else as the breadwinner.
Who do you look up to now and why?
I have a great deal of admiration for female politicians regardless of their politics. It’s so rare to see women as political leaders – it’s not an easy career path.
When I was a schoolgirl, I remember Indira Gandhi being the leader of India and Margaret Thatcher being in power during the eighties. And I think regardless of what you feel about their politics, and they are two quite different women, you have to admire the fact that they led two very large democracies. It was very impressive.
My father also told me stories about Marie Curie, who was a female scientist working at the beginning of the 20th century. I was never in any doubt that I couldn’t do STEM as a female.
How does your science degree benefit you in your role as a patent attorney?
In undertaking a science degree, although you train specifically in a particular field, the general skills that you learn in terms of looking at a set of facts or information and making sense of them according to overlying theories and frameworks are a useful training and background for the law. Typically, you’re looking at a number of facts – they might not be scientific data that’s been generated by an experiment, but they are real-life facts that you have to consider. You need to make sense of them and to apply the law to them. If you have a love of science and how things work, then you like to drill down into the detail of a particular problem and see what theory fits.
What role do you think we all need to play in supporting a greater uptake of women in STEM?
I think parents and teachers have a great role to play in encouraging their daughters to study STEM subjects. I think there’s a perception that girls are often, because of the way the right-hand and left-hand sides of the brain work, that they more easily fit within careers which have a humanities and a communication role. So it’s natural to come to the conclusion “Well, you’re good at verbal and written communication. You’re good at English. That’s your best subject. So we’ll steer you into a humanities pathway.”
What they sometimes forget is that even though their daughter might be an A student in English, the fact that she is a B student in maths or chemistry or biology shows that she also has a lot of ability in that field. And I think parents shouldn’t necessarily steer their daughters into a field based on their best subject, but realize that if they’re coping well, not necessarily excelling, but if they’re coping well with STEM subjects, then they should be encouraged as much as possible to follow a STEM pathway because you don’t have to excel in STEM subjects to have a great career in STEM. Teachers also play a role – my experience is that they will tend to encourage girls towards the humanities where they get their best marks. While this strategy might lead to high ATAR scores, in the long term this might short change girls in terms of the career opportunities open to them.
Is there any advice you would like to share with women embarking on a STEM career?
I don’t know about the advice, but I would say congratulations! You’ve got a great career path ahead of you with so many possibilities and different pathways that will be open to you. You’re going to have a fun journey that will be interesting at every turn. You’ll meet and work with so many exciting people who are trying to solve different problems and make a difference to the success of businesses and society in general. It’s an immensely rewarding career.
Get connected
+ 08 9216 5111
+ mary.turonek@wrays.com.au
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