A Fulfilling Career? Factors which influence women's choice of profession

First year university students enrolled on courses which have remained male dominated, including engineering, physics and computer science (n = 294) and two courses, law and medicine, on which females now outnumber males (n = 377), completed a questionnaire concerned with the reasons why they chose their particular course. Analyses were carried out using a stepwise discriminant function analysis. The results of this study indicate that the reasons women favour law and medicine, rather than more technological courses, is that the former courses are seen as leading to work that contributes to playing a useful social role and that allows a higher level of social contact. It is concluded that although women tend to avoid technological courses this is not a negative choice, rather they positively choose courses which lead to careers with higher levels of social involvement.     

Internationalisation and migrant academics: the hidden narratives of mobility

In this paper, we present an analysis of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education (SoTL) which contributes to SoTL both as a field of research practice and as a background to professional development in higher education. We analyse and describe the constitution of the field, and in so doing address its nature in the face of the dilemma of, on the one hand, its diversity and, on the other hand, its generally agreed set of purposes. Our analysis of SoTL knowledge is conceptualised as relational, connecting SoTL practitioners with the work they disseminate to the community at large. We describe and exemplify the internal horizon of the field in terms of five domains: the didactic and the epistemic, which we refer to as the knowledge building domains, and the interpersonal, the moral/ethical and the societal domains, which we refer to as the axiological domains. The external horizon is described in terms of four aspects of the context that can impact the production and implementation of SoTL knowledge: the disciplinary, the professional, the cultural and the political aspects. Methodological emphasis is equally on the axiological underpinnings of SoTL, its values and attitudes, as the ontological and epistemological underpinnings that are predominant.