Challenges for Chinese Women in the Field of Geosciences and Enlightenments from Australia’s STEM Diversity Strategy

As a key branch of the STEM fields, geoscience has been facing challenges of gender imbalance for a long time, with women encountering systematic barriers in career advancement, fieldwork, and disciplinary culture. Based on a strategic analysis of Australia's Pathway to Diversity in STEM Review Final Recommendations and considering the unique disciplinary characteristics of geoscience, this paper systematically examines the experiential challenges women face in the field and their structural causes. An integrated implementation framework is constructed, encompassing four key pathways: gender-sensitive reforms in the education system, innovative supportive institutional practices, embedding gender indicators into policy and funding systems, and fostering international collaborative networks. It proposes that future efforts should focus on strengthening local empirical research, promoting the transformation of evaluation mechanisms, and enhancing cross-sectoral leadership. This aims to deeply integrate gender equality into the developmental fabric of geoscience, providing a reference for building an inclusive and excellent geoscientific community.