Hi Paul,

Yes, that disparity between Indigenous girls and boys - it could be to do with at least two factors:

* Indigenous secondary students are less likely (and maybe boys more so) to go for Maths and Sciences, and so the boys shut themselves out of all of those male-stereotyped courses and careers;

* vice versa, the girls tend to enrol at universities in Arts, Education, Nursing, Social Sciences and Humanities, which don't need so much Maths. Boys tend to shun female-stereotyped courses.

When I was working in Indigenous support programs at universities here in SA, I had hoped that similar focussed support programs would be initiated in secondary schools, and even upper primary school classes. When we ran Career Aspiration workshops, we went down to Class/Grade Six and even lower if we could. Pity it didn't happen.

I still remember in about 1994 a little girl, actually in Grade Two, coming up to me after a session at a remote community and asking "What you fellas doing ?" I said that we were encouraging kids to think about what sort of jobs they wanted to do when they grew up, and giving them stuff about the careers they liked. "You got anything about Nursing ?" she asked. I gave her a CES leaflet about what was involved in Nursing. Last I heard, she was working in a medical surgery. Grade Two.

Usually these days, university programs send out staff to talk only to kids in Years 11 and 12, if that. Of course, most kids have already made up their minds by then. Almost utterly useless.

One obstacle, even from people supposedly working in Indigenous education, was the complaint that "Yeah, but not all Indigenous kids are going to go to university." I took that to mean that those people thought that Indigenous people shouldn't be going to university at all, or in decent numbers, it was only for a select few. Utter bastards.

Joe