Elizabeth Sullivan
National Health and Medical Research Council
Ceremony: 14 October 2016, 10.30am
Speech
It gives me great privilege actually to be your occasional speaker today. So, as you can see, I’m feeling a bit nervous, and I’ve just been so impressed by how everyone has walked up here and received their degrees, and when I was thinking about what I was going to speak about today, I thought about a couple of my favourite quotes. One was from Eleanor Roosevelt: ‘Do one thing every day that scares you.’ Tick. This is it. The second thing was one by Robert F. Kennedy, which was: ‘Only those who dare to fail greatly ever achieve greatly.’
Then I thought oh no, what if I’m encouraging everyone to fail a few courses, having been the parent of someone who did that many times?
And probably wasn’t quite the right message, but since you’re all getting your graduate degrees today and hopefully will be coming back for more, I think I can say it. But then I thought, what really unifies us all? What have we all got in common? And I think what we have collectively is that we value education. Everyone in this room today at some level values education, either as people who are supporting you to be educated or as the graduates themselves. So what I’d like to talk about today is education of girls and women, and the impact it has on society, because as a public health physician, the thing I’ve learned over the years is that the two things that count most in health are making sure the economist is on your side and will provide money, and the second thing is that education changes everything.
So when I was preparing these remarks, I thought back to my own graduation. So I graduated before most of you were born, so in 1985, and what is really interesting is my first thought was that when I graduated, I had to wear white shoes, a white dress, and in those days the women were expected to wear white. And I graduated in a university up the road, that shares part of the same name, and it’s so, so wonderful today to see the rainbows of colour and the cultural diversity that we see in this room as everyone came up to receive their degrees.
The second thing was that until last night, I hadn’t realised I was the first woman in my family to actually go to university. That’s because I was so fortunate that when I grew up, it was just natural – I thought everyone went to university, which in some ways is a bit embarrassing, but my brothers were going, my father had gone to university, but my mother had come from a family that had never been to university, and there’d been no women in Dad’s family that had ever been to university. So I would like to particularly acknowledge in this room, anyone here who is the first member of their generation, or the first member of their family, ever, to be a graduate, because it is a wonderful step and something that should be really celebrated greatly. So I came from a family where I had three brothers, and I was the only daughter. I was very lucky – I had the same opportunities as my brothers, and I can now say that when we have family dinners, I’m the platinum frequent flyer, in that I have the most degrees – it’s one of the few things I can beat them at. So I’m hoping that a few of the women in the room will be also along that track.
But this is not the norm internationally, where recently the Director General of UNESCO reported in the 2015 EFA Global Monitoring Report that 58 million children remain out of school globally. That’s over twice the population of Australia, and that around another 100 million children do not complete primary school. And I suppose the most sobering about this inequality is that it is getting worse in the poorest countries. So you are now graduands of UTS, and UTS has a proud history of social justice, which has been alluded to previously, and of international engagement.
Today I’m calling on you to have a lifelong action at any level to advocate for the education of girls here and abroad, and I think this is particularly relevant, as I’ve seen so many of you have come from the Faculty of Arts and Social Science, where education, marketing, innovation, entrepreneurship is there, and also from the Faculty of Health and Graduate School of Health, where health, of course, is intimately connected to education. So I graduated with a medical degree in 1985, and very early on was interested in public health, and that’s, at how a population level you can prevent, promote and protect the health of all. I actually never planned my career – I sort of thought I was going to be a wealthy dermatologist but somehow I ended up, ending up in public health. However, I had many, many opportunities – I completed a Master of Public Health and went on a fellowship for the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention in Georgia in the US, and that’s where you become a disease detective.
Many of you may have seen the 2011 American medical thriller disaster film Contagion. Well, I was one of those people, out looking for diseases, trying to stop pandemics and save the world. So my life went a bit on another track where, it wasn’t quite as exciting, but one of my experiences when I worked there was to go with the US government to southern Africa where there was a very significant drought, and I was assigned to Botswana, Zimbabwe, Zambia and Malawi as the health expert at the age of 25. And what I saw and experienced in Malawi, one of the poorest countries in the world, really, I suppose, set me on my path for interest in women’s empowerment and their health, and particularly a healthy start to life for babies. What did I see? Well, from a health perspective, I saw horrendous refugee camps and countrysides, widespread malnutrition and stunting – stunting is something you should never see, totally preventable. Preventable diseases, so a lack of immunisation, the first onslaught of HIV wiping out really the middle class with education, and what was most disturbing was a lack of educational access for most of the population. The lost opportunities for women and children were stark, and there was no way out of poverty and its health consequences without education, but education in Malawi was not free.
So what is the evidence that education transforms girls’ and women’s lives, and has a major impact on society? These are just some of the few figures – educated women are less likely to die in childbirth. In Australia, and I used to do the maternal death reports, we have about 10 deaths per year from direct maternal deaths. However, internationally there are 98,000 lives that could be saved if women had primary education per year. So educating women will lead to less women dying in childbirth, and would reduce it by two-thirds.
Also, educating girls can save millions of lives. If all women had primary education, there’d be 15 per cent fewer child deaths. A mother’s education improves nutrition – if all women had secondary education, 12 million children would be precluded from being stunted from malnutrition. Girls with higher levels of education are less likely to have children at an early age, less likely to be child brides, so almost 60 per cent fewer girls would become pregnant under 17 in sub-Saharan Africa and south and west Asia if they had secondary education. Girls with high levels of education are less likely to get married, if all girls had secondary education we would have two-thirds fewer child marriages, and I suppose even if I sort of now talk to the economists in the room, educated women are much more likely to find work, and contribute to the formal economy, and make us great. Men and women together make a great economy. So in Australia today, we are well on the way to attaining United Nations’ new sustainable development goal which is about ensuring inclusive and equitable quality education and promoting lifelong learning opportunities for all.
In this room, we are all somewhere on that path, and we should be heartily congratulated for it, and for the hard work and commitment it has taken and it will take to continue with further education. But there are two stories in the world at the moment – there’s our story, my daughter’s story, your daughters’’ and sons’ stories, and then there’s the other story – there’s the story of the girls of Chibok in Nigeria, who in the middle of the night were abducted from their school dormitories by Boko Haram gunmen, put on a truck, and then taken away, so to date in the news today, the 219 young girls were taken – we’re talking junior secondary school girls – they’ve had no recourse in terms of education or really future. The Nigerians noted today on the ABC that 20 had been rescued but there are still hundreds of these young women and other kids that have been taken in not such high profile cases being held and being precluded from having what we consider a reasonable life.
The other one, I think, which is salutary in the last couple of years of course, and quite famous, is the story of Malala, the Pakistani activist for female education who was shot at the age of 15, in October 2012 on a school bus, because she was daring to attend school in northwest Pakistan. Now, she survived – unbelievably, because she was shot in the head – and is an international activist, but I think we again, as has been said earlier, are very fortunate. The battle for education of girls remains. Therefore, my kids say ‘Oh, you’re so serious – get off the feminist bandwagon’ but I think it’s an important message. So what I want to do now is transport you back to this really fascinating building in sunny Sydney on this glorious day that you deserve to celebrate within Tower 1, which is a beacon of brutalist architecture, but also really a dynamic and vibrant beacon of education in downtown Sydney, and take a moment to reflect on how you got here. Who was influential in your life, gave you the right start to life, and helped inform the decision to get a university education? Because now as graduates and as parents and as supporters, we are extending the baton to you.
You’ve got the tools, you’ve got the leadership skills, you’ve got the innovation, the techno stuff, entrepreneurship – you’ve got all that. We are looking forward to you to be the leaders for the future, and with that, and I want to extend you every success and joy in your careers in the future, I want to congratulate you on your graduation, and wish you and you families well and enjoy the day. Thank you.
About the speaker
Professor Elizabeth Sullivan is an internationally esteemed public health physician with over 24 years' experience as a medical epidemiologist, specialising in the fields of perinatal, maternal, sexual, and reproductive health.
Liz was recently appointed to the National Health and Medical Research Council for 2015-2018. She is a member of the Obstetrics Clinical Committee of the Medicare Benefits Schedule Review Taskforce, as well head of the UTS team for the Science in Australia Gender Equity National Pilot. Liz is committed to the advancement of gender equality in academia through addressing unequal gender representation and empowering women across academic disciplines.
Liz has a strong commitment to social justice and is nationally and internationally recognised for her innovative program of population health and health services research, focusing on vulnerable reproductive populations. Her research focuses specifically on Aboriginal women, mental health, substance use, severe rare illness in pregnancy, pregnancy in prison, and infertility. She has increasingly focused on health inequality among mothers and the immediate and longer term health impact on their infants.
Liz has had a successful track record of research development and management. With more than $20 million in research and contract funding as a chief investigator, several national and international collaborations and over 170 peer review publications.
