Dr. Morley Muse On The Societal And Economic Value Generated By Employing Women In STEM
Dr. Morley Muse is a chemical, environmental and renewable energy engineer with expertise in waste-to-energy generation, wastewater treatment, renewable hydrogen generation, biofuels production and energy transition including storage, transmission and waste heat reuse.
She holds multiple board/executive leadership positions and has worked across academia and industry including in consulting and construction.
Dr. Muse has received various awards for her work in advancing women in STEM, which is highly male-dominated. She is the winner of the 2022 Women’s Agenda awards for the Emerging Leader in STEM category. Her most recent recognition is being a finalist for the CEO/Board Executive category in the 2023 Recalibrate Gender Equity Awards.
She is the co-founder of multi-award winning iSTEM Co., a research, consulting, and talent-sourcing business that enables employment for women in STEM, Morley continues to encourage women, including diverse women to further their careers in STEM.
Dr. Muse discusses using technology and AI to enhance the inclusion of women in STEM, the economic value of this shift in employment, and how environmental innovation and biofuels will lead to growth in clean energy and waste reduction.
Highlights from the interview (listen to the podcast for full details)
[Sarah Ripper] - To start off, can you please share a bit about your background and what led you to where you are today?
[Dr. Morley Muse] - I'm Morley, and I'm an engineer. I'm passionate about three things in life, climate change, renewable energy, and women. Since I'm an engineer who happens to be woman in STEM, the work I do centres around one of those three things.
Can you tell us more about how you're advocating for women to be represented and included in STEM spaces locally, nationally, and internationally?
I'll give a little bit of insight as to why I'm doing this in the first place and why it matters. I moved to Australia almost 12 years ago from the UK. I was born in Nigeria, and when I came to Australia, I came in on the Skilled Migration program. I came in as a skilled engineer, so I didn't think it would be difficult finding work.
I faced a couple of challenges a lot of challenges, but I won’t go into these for our young listeners or audiences. We want them to see STEM as the place to be, and it is the place to be.
Eventually, I decided to do a PhD, even though I already had a bachelor's degree in chemical and environmental engineering from Nottingham University and a master's in sustainable power. Now, the interesting thing was I started three weeks after having my first son. I know that sounds crazy, but I think it takes crazy to do exceptionally brilliant things, because you can't want to do innovative things and try to do everything the same way.
When I started my PhD, it was isolating being a female PhD student in engineering, but even more so as a mum. I also noticed that within the university, there were lots of girls who would come in the first year, but by the second year, they had dropped out, specifically in the engineering discipline. I’m one of those people who says if there's a problem, try to fix it, and if I can't fix it, simply don't speak about it. I try to be part of the solution, I guess that's why I'm an engineer.
I started a club within the university eight years ago, the Women in Science and Engineering Club at Victoria University. Today it's still one of the best clubs on campus, and two years ago, I was given alumni recognition for my efforts in starting that, which I don't take lightly. But beyond the walls of the university, I noticed this was a problem that was prevalent across Australia, and I wanted to be part of the solution.
I got in touch with Women in STEMM Australia and became a board director in 2019. It's been almost five years now, and that's how I got launched to being a national STEM leader.
I noticed certain issues, yes, we do have women underrepresented in STEM fields, STEM as in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics. But the issue here is for a long time we've focused so much on education, but education is not the only area we should focus on. I understand that this is because the perception has been that girls are not interested in STEM disciplines, but that's not what the statistics are quite saying. In Australia, 36% of university enrolments in STEM are women.
One of the major challenges we face is translating those qualifications to actual employment, and women make up just 15% of STEM qualified occupations. Even though they are coming out of university with those degrees, you're seeing they are not actually putting it to work. This is very important, because the STEM sector is critical for innovation and job creation.
The key areas where we need to grow as an economy are STEM based: agriculture, cyber security, climate change, and renewable energy. All these areas are in STEM, so if we have qualified women but we are not putting them to use, then how can we grow as an economy? We must stop seeing diversity as charity, but instead as innovation.
For a long time in the past, we had those ‘Nokia moments’, my first phone was a Nokia 3310. No one ever thought a time would come where Nokia would be replaced by companies like Apple or Samsung, but it happened. Why did that happen? Because they refused to embrace innovation and the digital age at the time when they should have.
For people or companies who fail to embrace diversity, that's exactly what's going to happen. Again, the story with Kodak is the same thing, we all had those Kodak moments, I certainly did! We never thought that could be replaced by what we have now. That's what happens when we fail to embrace diversity or change, so we shouldn't be afraid of it.
That's what led me to the work that I do, seeing those statistics and just seeing that as a country we need to ensure we have all hands-on deck to solve this problem. I try to focus on five key areas, education, employment, retention, leadership, and entrepreneurship, because those are the areas we need to grow and invest in.
This International Women's Day, the team is investing in women and accelerating progress. These are the areas we must invest in for us to see significant transformative change for women in STEM.
What projects or initiatives are you seeing come out of this push for women in STEM, is this movement progressing in other places and spaces also?
We are very eager to see growth, fast growth, but you also must look at where we've come from historically and where we are right now.
The World Economic Forum estimates it's going to take 131 years to close the gender gap, that's a very long time. While I think there is a little bit of growth, it's not as fast as it should be.
Of course, one area that I’ve certainly seen a bit of growth is in awareness. At this point in time, there is no company who is not aware. We're aware that STEM is critical, we see it every day on the news. We are also aware that there is a disproportionate number of women not in the field. We must change this because it's good to do, but we then must then see the economic value.
Last year, the federal government set up a tax force. Interestingly, the results from the Federal Government Women Equality Tax where it costs Australia $128 billion annually. The cost of gender inequality to us as a nation is 128 $billion, so for the first time we’re putting a dollar value to this problem. That's when we can start making changes, when we see the dollar value. But not just even dollar value, I was doing personal research (I'm a researcher, so I love doing this) and I found that in the last 23 years in Australia, last year we had the lowest birth rate.
Women do not want to have kids, but why should they when they are penalised for doing so? In fact, they should be celebrated, because they are giving birth to the next generation of the labour force. If women don't give birth, then as a nation there is no sustainability.
We must see this problem from not just a social impact, economic, or a sustainability perspective, because we need our population. We still have a population of just around 26 million people. For us to compete globally, look at the United States, it has a population of 331 million. Yes, Australia is a key player in terms of economic contribution globally, but for us to increase that we need more hands-on deck.
This is the reason why we need inclusion, it's not just about pushing for diversity, but it’s about creating that inclusion so everyone feels like they can truly bring their skills or talents to work. They can know that their skills or talents will be valued. This is the change I want to see in the world, not just something we change one day, just because it's International Women's Day.
In chemistry, there are different types of reactions, there are reversible and irreversible reactions. Reversible reactions are when two substances come together but could still be split back up after the reaction to their original states. Irreversible reactions are reactions that create an entirely new substance, the components can never be changed back to their previous state.
When that happens, I call it in my own terms, transformation. When it changes, it can't be undone, it's almost like a metamorphosis, where a caterpillar becomes a butterfly. That's the change we need to move the needle, we need to know it's not just an International Women's Day, where we change and then change back after.
We need lasting change where we understand the impact and reason why we need to change, not just because it's a good thing to do. Yes, it is a good thing to do, but there is also economic value as to why we need to change.
Can you share more about your work as an engineer and an expert in converting waste for energy generation? What innovations are happening in this space?
Before going into that, I want to touch a little bit more on the previous question. Regarding the current work that I do, three years ago I founded a company called iSTEM Co. We do a lot of research, consulting, and talent sourcing, and when we started this company, our aim was to address the representation of women in STEM through education, employment, entrepreneurship, leadership, and retention.
A lot of companies kept saying they didn't know where to find women, that's why they don't have women in their workplace. We created this company to bridge that gap, we have events like career fair, employability workshops, and workshops within companies to help their staff and leaders to be a lot more inclusive.
One thing we kept seeing that was lacking was women kept saying they were applying to companies, but they weren't getting through. On the other hand, companies were saying they couldn't find women. It was even worse for women who have intersectional diversity, especially women from ethnic and racially marginalised groups.
There is a study from Monash University highlight how people with non-anglo sounding names often must change their names to anglo names to get their first opportunity to even grow. Now we could keep saying this is wrong, or we could decide to do something about it, so that's what we did at iSTEM. Last year we launched a platform called D.A.R.E, which stands for Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Retention. Essentially, what we say to companies is we dare them to D.A.R.E.
Our platform has five key features that we use to eliminate recruitment bias. We have anonymous recruitment, so when women come on our platform, their name, age, and all the elements which could result in them being discriminated against during the recruitment process is completely anonymised. As an employer, let's say you advertise a job for an environmental engineer, you could see that women apply, but you don't know who is applying, you'd see a number pop up.
People are identified by numbers and all their skills, their qualifications are still there, but elements that would make you discriminate against them like their names or gender are all blinded out. What we are now also doing is using AI. We've paused activities on the platform, but we are releasing a second version sometime next month.
We've incorporated AI into the platform to amplify its ability to match women to employers easier, but also to include features like inclusive language. Often, the reason why women don't apply for jobs is the language that recruiters use is not inclusive. People just see these roles and think they are not for them, so we want to ensure there is that inclusive language.
When you start the role, the AI tool can advise you. Then on the platform, you can conduct interviews and get real life feedback. That's one thing we are doing, using technology to address bias in recruitment and to promote gender diversity.
Coming back to the question about waste, with the way the world is right now, we have a population of almost nine billion people. It's almost like we have scarce resources, so we must think in terms of a circular economy. We shouldn't see anything as waste. A lot of what I do now has been deeply influenced by growing up with my dad, God bless his soul, rest in peace. But seriously, he inspired me a lot.
He never saw anything as waste, he would always ask, “what can we turn this into? How can we convert this into a useful product?” Before we get to the complete life cycle of products in our house, he would always try to find a use for everything. He just never believed in waste, so I grew up with that mindset. During my PhD, I decided I was going to focus on waste to energy generation.
My desire to become a renewable energy engineer began when I was about 14. I grew up in Nigeria, and the part of Nigeria where I was born was the Southern part. In this region there is an abundance of crude oil, but with that I also witnessed firsthand the adverse effects of crude oil on the environment. On one side, people could see the benefits, but the people from the communities who lived where oil was being drilled could also see the adverse effects, like oil spillages and gas flaring. I had this visit (it was an excursion I think) to an oil company.
When we went for this visit, they told us about gas flares and oil spillages, which is interesting because oil companies are usually responsible for this issue. They owned this problem, then they asked us very young minds how we can solve this problem? A question popped into my mind, is there a way to generate energy without polluting the environment? I decided I was going to be part of the solution.
20 years down the line, this is what I'm doing. During my PhD, I looked at converting microalgae from wastewater into biogas. You see blue green algae often sitting on water ponds, so a lot of the wastewater utilities see it as a nuisance, as waste. Oftentimes they must spend money to get rid of it. Now these algae are very high in nitrogen and phosphorus, which are useful as fertilisers, but in very raw form you don't get a lot of fertiliser base. However, they also are very high in what you call lipid content, basically a high oil content.
There are many things you can do with that oil content, one of which is you can pass it through a process called transesterification, where the lipids are converted to biodiesel, which is a very clean form of diesel. You could also go through another process called anaerobic digestion and produce biogas, which has 70% methane that can then be used for generating electricity or other energy uses.
You could even decide to use what you get before the biogas, something called volatile fatty acids which are useful in the pharmaceutical industry (however this is also waste at the initial stage). The problem with microalgae is that because they’ve lived in an aquatic environment, they form a resistance to bacteria attacks, so they have a tough cell wall.
My project focused on breaking down that cell wall and maximising gas production. There are several interesting ways in which we can convert waste to energy. What the human mind can do is just mind blowing, so we must keep thinking around us. Think of problems but also solutions. Anyone can be a scientist.
Scientists are exceptional, but I think anyone can be a scientist. It’s about being inquisitive around you, asking relevant questions and being concerned so much about a problem that you decide to be part of the solution.
That's one initiative of turning waste into energy, but there are so many more examples of researchers doing brilliant, amazing stuff in this field.
To finish off, what books or resources would you recommend to our audience?
I love reading books. It depends on what stage of life you're at and what you're interested in. One I love is on leadership, John Maxwell 21 years for table laws of leadership. I love reading books and watching documentaries like Oppenheimer, he did so many amazing things. Yes, the atomic bomb is not the best thing that would come out of the Theory of Relativity, but I’m just always curious about how the mind works.
For anyone listening, if you want to do something exceptional, look for people who you think have already done that and try to learn more about them.
There's nothing new, but there are different, new ways of doing the same old stuff, so look to people that have done that before to try and understand their mindsets; learn and draw inspiration from that to write your own story and be your own author.
At the end of the day, you learn from other people, but for me the footprint I want to leave on the Earth is to let my life be its own book. Write your own story, because when you try to be someone else, you can only be the second best. Be original and intentional about the change you want to create in the world, and you'll find out how you can do anything.
