1:30min
By Jingyi Chen
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In September, the National Rural Women’s Coalition (NRWC) hosted a roundtable on ‘How to achieve gender equality in rural, regional and remote Australia’. I was thankful for the opportunity to attend on behalf of Optometry Australia, and speak about my experiences in this space.
The NRWC is an organisation that gives a national voice to women residing in rural, regional and remote communities throughout Australia. As an optometrist who has lived and worked in regional Australia, and having recently started my PhD on rural and remote access to eye care, this topic not only personally interests me but also deeply resonates with me.
We discussed various topics on the day, including gender and rural statistics, the still-existing gender pay gap, barriers that women face in moving back to rural areas, LGBTQIA+ support, social isolation, domestic violence, career opportunities, and healthcare access.
Workforce statistics show that many industries in rural areas are still very much divided by gender. One attendee at the roundtable commented on how they hope to one day see women working in traditionally male-dominated professions, such as mining, without having to do a double take. It was interesting for me to reflect how Optometry as a profession has evolved in this way.
The topic of safety arose a few times and we discussed how this issue perhaps disproportionately affects women more than men. Infrastructure is another complex issue that we discussed, as people living in rural areas face specific challenges in housing, roads, education, and healthcare. Attendees shared their personal experiences on challenges in accessing healthcare, with many having to wait weeks to months for medical appointments or needing to travel extremely long distances when there were no local services available.
Many attendees brought up the idea that there are still organisations that do not have women in senior leadership positions or on boards, and how the lack of representation may discourage younger women from even considering this as a possibility in their future.
These discussions made me reflect on how far we’ve come as women but collectively, we agreed that it also highlighted how far we still have to go. Although we acknowledged that the roundtable was not going to solve all of the problems that women face in rural Australia, it was great to be part of the beginning of a very important conversation.
Jingyi Chen is currently undergoing a PhD on rural and remote access to eye care. She is the outgoing Chair of the NSW/ACT Early Career Optometrists (ECONA) committee, and was an inaugural participant of Optometry Australia’s 2019 Student Leadership Program.
In 2022, Jingyi shared her experience of being a young woman in optometry as part of Optometry Australia’s “Respect. Always!” campaign. This important campaign sends a strong message that any form of bias, harassment or aggression will not be tolerated in optometry. To find out more about Respect. Always!, members can visit the Workplace respect page on our website. Optometry Australia thanks the National Rural Women’s Coalition for the invitation to attend this event.