Defying gravity: Elise Stephenson is propelling gender equality into orbit

Some people are born knowing their purpose in life. It took Dr Elise Stephenson a few plot twists to find hers.

She had always grappled with the slightly clichéd advice about following one’s passions.

“I didn’t know what my passion was. How was I supposed to just find one?” says Stephenson.  

“I turned toward the things that angered me, the things I didn’t like, and used that to guide me. Gender inequality was on top of that list.”

This unconventional philosophy led Stephenson to places she never could have imagined: from sitting down for face-to-face interviews with Julia Gillard and Julie Bishop, to being recognised as a top LGBTI+ leader by Google and Deloitte.

But before she could reach those heights, life turned her world upside down.  

“In Year 11, I lost function in both of my hands. I couldn’t write; I couldn’t type. Even after surgery, I never fully recovered function,” she recalls.

Adversity gave Stephenson a choice: stand still or go full throttle. She chose the latter.

Unable to rely on her hands, she completed her degree using speech dictation software, and later embarked on a PhD while simultaneously founding a communication business with her sister, building a tiny home with her wife, and travelling around Australia.

“I was always scared of living a normal life,” she says. “But the hardships helped me concentrate on not doing so. I told myself – do impactful things, make change but don’t work yourself to the bone without living.”

The girl who once struggled to find her true calling is today driving real-world change as a political scientist and international relations scholar. Her research is helping navigate gender (in)equality in emerging policy frontiers.

Artificially unequal

As Deputy Director of the Global Institute for Women’s Leadership at The Australian National University, Stephenson is confronting an omnipresent enemy: gender bias in artificial intelligence (AI).

“Generative AI is being used with deeply gendered applications, from deep fakes to revenge pornography,” she says. 

“There are also in-built biases. For instance, on the job hiring front. When you train your AI models to select a candidate based on who was successful in the past, you usually get a very specific demographic put forward.”

Recently, OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, made headlines for appointing a predominantly male board of directors – a decision with serious ramifications for society.

“We must ensure we do have women and gender diversity at the AI decision table,” says Stephenson.

“Designers and developers are not neutral. Whoever we are matters to the types of technology we produce.”

The moment to act, she stresses, is now.

“AI is a technology domain that is developing very quickly. There is a flood of resources, funding, attention and new institutions emerging. If we don’t bring a specifically gendered lens to what we do, we run the risk of just repeating the inequalities of the past,” she says.  

“How you start an institution matters to how it will forever develop. That’s why this inflection point is critical.”

“I’m working with the Australian government to understand how their policies and departments are evolving and responding to AI.

“By mapping challenges and opportunities, I hope to produce evidence that shows what we must do to design gender-responsive policies.”

Making space herstory

Stephenson believes no field is off-limits when it comes to gender equality.

Recently, she authored the first-ever report on this issue in the space sector, published by the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs.

“If you consider the decades-old history of the space industry, it is quite major that only in 2024 do we have the first global study of women in space agencies and public space institutions,” she says.

The results, unfortunately, did not surprise her.

“Women represent about 30 per cent of public sector space organisations. Of which, only 24 per cent are managers, 21 per cent in executive roles and 19 per cent in board positions,” she explains.  

“Although women completed the same tests as the first men astronauts in the US and even outperformed men in many tests, the US didn’t allow women in these roles until decades later. We’re still waiting for the first woman on the moon.”

This year, Katherine Bennell-Pegg made history as Australia’s first female astronaut.

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Stephenson is helping rewrite the rules to ensure people of all genders can fulfill their aspirations in a world increasingly reliant on space technologies and infrastructure (think: everything from GPS, to earth observation of climate change, communications and more).  

But with some tech billionaires already vying to monopolise the galaxy, it won’t be an easy ride. 

“The idea that there is a race to space and whoever mines or ‘settles’ space first sets the norms and values really worries me,” she says.  

“Some of the players who have the greatest capability to do this are – among other things – also known for sexism, misogyny and other problematic kind of views and thoughts.

“I’d really love this to be a conversation that humanity as a whole has an opportunity to be part of. Not just some people in some countries who have a lot of money.”

Closer, but not there yet

While Australian institutions have made significant strides in gender equality over the last decade, further progress is needed.

“We’ve closed a lot of surface level statistical gender gaps in terms of representation. But there is a lot more work to do on things like pay gaps and experiences,” says Stephenson.

In her recently published book, The face of nation, she exposes some of the ongoing challenges, including underrepresentation in key areas such as foreign affairs.

“We are seeing this kind of glass cliff situation where there are more women than ever, but they don’t necessarily have the authority or the power or funding that we might expect,” she says.

With trans and gender policies being dismissed as ‘woke’ by antidemocratic leaders, Stephenson sees academia playing a vital role in achieving progress.

“In our Institute, we have a strong mandate to improve lives and policies with our research. That’s why we have a responsibility to work with the government,” she says.  

“We also must engage with the media and confront myths and fake news using the data and the evidence. It’s our obligation.

“Ultimately, all I want is for every human to have freedom, safety, be free from violence, respected and treated with dignity. No matter what the domain is.”