Today is Ada Lovelace Day, an international day of blogging to draw attention to women excelling in science and technology.

Women made up 24% of the Bureau of Meteorology’s staff at the end of 2009. But even within the Bureau, the numbers differ widely from classification to classification – women make up 16% of the IT Officers, 14% of the Technical Officers, but over 55% of the Administrative Service Officers. (2008-09 Annual Report – Appendix 3)

Somewhat surprisingly, to me at least, The Bureau has the lowest proportion of women of all the federal government agencies – even lower than the Department of Defence, which manages some 40% female participation. (APSC State of the Service report, 2008-09)

Chart showing gender breakdown amongst all the federal government agencies. Image from the 2005-06 State of the Service Report (things have improved slightly since then).

It was only 1966 that the marriage bar was lifted in the public service – a law that women employees had to resign once they married.

During World War II, as in many industries, women began working at the Bureau as the men were out at war. The Women’s Auxiliary Australian Air Force (WAAAF)

Members of the Women’s Auxiliary Australian Air Force prepare a weather analysis chart in the Central Forecasting Room of the Bureau of Meteorology, Melbourne, Victoria, on Monday 9 November 1942. The woman seated at right reads out the weather observations to her colleague, who plots them on the chart. Image from p211, “The Weather Watchers: 100 Years of the Bureau of Meteorology” by David Day. Source: BOM image catalogue reference “general78”.

One of the met members of the WAAAF was Beryl Bedgood, who later married and was known as Dame Beryl Beaurepaire. She is generally better known for her fundraising and charity work, and her work for women’s rights, and she was reportedly at one point the most powerful woman in the Liberal party.

Sergeant Beryl Edith Bedggood, WAAAF Meteorological Observer serving at No 1 Operational Training Unit RAAF. RAAF Station east Sale, Vic, 25 October 1944. From the Australian War Memorial website.

From a 2005 interview, she talks about her experience in the WAAAF:

Well, I went to join up and it was in a car sales place in Russell Street, and oh, I was questioned like mad. Was I unhappy at home? And so many things. And I said, No. And I remember saying to them, Look, my father’s in the Air Force, that’s why I chose the Air Force, and also I’m science-interested, and I believe soon there will be places in the meteorological section. ‘Oh no, they won’t allow any women into that’. I said, ‘Well look, I’d like to get into that section and find out.’ So anyway, I started off as a drill instructor, of all things, because it was the only way I could get in. and so soon after I finished that course, I was able to re-muster, as it was called, to a meteorological assistant, and there were three of us in a class of forty, the rest were men. And we of course topped the class, because we’d had to have either a Matriculation or a University year to get into it, and the men had only had to have the equivalent of Intermediate. And of course the men were all posted out to interesting active stations, and my two friends and I, we were posted to the Weather Bureau in Drummond Street, Carlton. And we just worked alongside public servants, and we got paid about a quarter of what they got paid. We had to work shifts, which included Saturdays and Sundays, with no extra money. If they worked Sunday they got time-and-a-half, or three times, and we got a bit jack of it. And one Saturday afternoon, my friend Lois and I were sitting in there, and we both got mad, because we were sitting there and we were running the whole place and only getting paid, I don’t know, 2/10d a day or something. So we took ourselves off and went down to call on the Director of the WAAAF, which was terribly naughty. We could have been court-martialled, but we went. And after we’d talked to her for about ten minutes, she sent for a cup of tea for us, so we thought, Well, we must have been received all right to be offered a cup of tea. And we just said, ‘We didn’t join the WAAAF to be public servants.’ And that was what it meant. And then about three months after that, I got sent to one operational training unit, East Sale, and my friend got sent to South Australia, Glenelg. And so I think that was when I started to realise that if you went to the top you sometimes got there, and since then, all my life I’ve endeavoured to go to the top to get what I wanted, and I think that if a lot of people went to the top instead of being put off by the clerks in the office, they’d have got more.

A very sensible philosophy!

The chapter Airwoman in the book “Beryl Beaurepaire”
by Michael McKernan has more detail about her time in the WAAAF.

The first major intake of women into the Meteorologists Course was in 1965. Image from p328, “The Weather Watchers”. Source: BOM image catalogue reference “general95”.

Despite the pioneering of the WAAAF, it took some 20 more years for women to get into the met course, and it was the mid 70s before observer positions were fully open to women. In 1980 there were just two women observers, to 430 men!

I also wanted to find an Australian woman who was an atmospheric scientist, and after a while I discovered Dr Jean Laby. I think there is a bio on her in Irresistible Forces: Australian women in science by Claire Hooker. (There’s also an interview online.)

So — go to the top!

More reading:

• Reporting the weather in The Sydney Papers (Volume 20 Issue 1 (Summer 2008)) by Elly Spark, if you have access to a library that subscribes to it…
• A section in Federation and Meteorology on the WAAAF
• Lots of interesting photos of the WAAAF members on the Australian War Memorial website
• NOAA (US) – Women in the Weather Bureau during World War II
• A brief piece on women in meteorology (US oriented).

So said Kate Lundy last week. (The twitterverse is accustomed to reading backwards.)

Senator Lundy’s link goes to a PDF report called Meteorological and Related Data from the 2008-09 Annual Report, and it looks thusly:

So Senate estimates are on. The transcripts are available in, uh… convenient… PDF form. Oh well, at least it gets published in a timely fashion. The second link entitled Environment, Communications, and the Arts (PDF) has the second half of that committee’s questioning, which includes the Bureau of Meteorology.

pp22-23:

Senator LUNDY— As far as accessing information by citizens to weather is concerned, how does that place you when compared with other what I would describe as primary sources of weather information? Does that mean more and more people are coming to you to get it straight from the horse’s mouth, so to speak, rather than using secondary weather information services? Have you done much analysis on that?

Dr Ayers— No. I do not have that detail. I do not know that we have that detail. Another point I would make about the ACMA report is that these little phones that I am waving around in the air here that everybody has these days, in looking at the uses of those phones, if I remember those numbers correctly, 68 per cent of people use these things for browsing the web. The next most common was 50 per cent who use them for news, and then at 48 per cent was checking the weather. I think you are quite right in the direction of your question, that providing information to the public is important. I can not tell you how many of those sorts of uses come to the bureau compared with other providers of weather information but it is an area that we have been working on. We are providing more information on the web. We have restructured the shape of the web, and we will be doing some thinking in the future about the possibility of iPhone applications.

Senator LUNDY— I was going to ask you about your mobile applications.

Dr Ayers— We are beginning to think about that.

Senator LUNDY— So you do not have one at the moment?

Dr Ayers— No, but in particular relating to some of the developments in the water area and the provision of water information, that is one of the areas that we are looking at.

Senator LUNDY— Not just iPhone, of course, but other smart phones?

Dr Ayers— Yes.

Senator LUNDY— Just checking, to make sure it is an open platform.

Dr Ayers— I have a battle with the head of the water division. He has an iPhone and I do not.

Senator LUNDY— We are all just jealous of him, it is all right.

Dr Ayers— We are having a battle internally.

Senator LUNDY— In terms of the availability of your datasets about the historical record of weather patterns and the climate, what are your policies around making those datasets available to researchers, to enthusiastic students who want to mash up the data and use it for themselves? What is your general approach to making those datasets available?

Dr Ayers— They are available via the web now, so anybody who wants to look at the historical record can go to the national climate record as it is housed in the bureau’s databases. You can go and download datasets that you can then put into spreadsheets and do other work.

Senator LUNDY— How do you manage the ownership or copyright associated with those datasets? Do you put them under a Creative Commons licence or something like that?

Dr Ayers— That is the direction that we have been heading in terms of the way in which we are handling water information as well. That is an area that we are exploring at the moment.

Senator LUNDY— Are you familiar with the government’s commissioned Gov2.0 Taskforce report?

Dr Ayers— Yes.

Senator LUNDY— I understand that the government is currently considering its response to it, but it presses the point about the use of the Creative Commons style licensing to help facilitate access to that information, to lower the levels of bureaucracy in getting access to it. I am amazed at the numbers. As I said, I had heard that there were some big ones, but 2.4 billion hits is a pretty big number, so congratulations on what you have achieved with your website. I will make a point of trying to ask you questions about your web presence every single estimates.

Dr Ayers— I will be prepared, Senator.

(links and formatting added by me, obvs)

It’s kinda awesome having Kate Lundy as a Senator, no?

ps. I tried to look for this on Open Australia and couldn’t find anything that looked like Senate estimates. Does OA not cover Senate estimates, or will it appear there in time?