A (wo)man’s world

By Niccola Anthony

Heather Felix is on a one-woman mission to change the way in which we see women in science, technology, engineering and mathematics, otherwise known as the “STEM” fields.

Hailing from Chicago, where she studied a masters in business systems and engineering, Ms Felix has extensive personal experience with the ways in which the STEM fields appear exclusionary to women.

She has worked on construction sites, in infrastructure and for an environmental company in her past “corporate” life, often being one of only a handful of women in such workplaces.

Now, a career rebirth as a professional photographer, with the help of the Photography Studies College, has enabled Ms Felix to combine her corporate-world business acumen with her artistic passion and impressive photography skills.

She has an exciting business idea in the pipeline. Her concept is a nationwide photography business based around family portraiture and professional headshots for low- and middle-income earners.

Ms Felix says it’s a concept that has been successful in the US and would fill a niche gap in the Australian market, considering the pressures of rising costs of living on many of these lower income consumers.

The business would also be underpinned by a charitable branch that works with community groups to provide professional photography to the most marginalised in our society, such as refugees and women escaping domestic abuse.

Furthermore, the business structure provides a great opportunity for mothers looking to return to the workforce in a flexible capacity, a pressure that Ms Felix understands all too well as a working mother herself.

“The provision of family headshots or portraiture is not exciting or new or innovative, but it’s really the business structure underneath it that’s special, which is actually about creating good jobs for mums needing flexible return-to-work options,” Felix said.

With this consideration for the needs of working mothers, Ms Felix proves herself as a champion for women from all walks of life. And the championing of women is a feisty undercurrent that features in most of her photographic works.

This semester at PSC, Ms Felix has been photographing women in the STEM fields at their workplaces with the intention of portraying these women in a completely different light to the way in which we’re used to seeing them.

Standard images of STEM women vary significantly from those of their male counterparts. While men are portrayed in a stoic and formidable fashion, women are often infantilised through techniques aimed at making them appear smaller and less obtrusive in relation to their surrounds.

“Even the women I’m working with put themselves into these disempowered poses because that’s what we’re so used to seeing,” Ms Felix said.

It’s not that one image itself is a problem, it’s the repetitiveness with which women are placed in a disempowered position all the time.

“It propagates this concept of the gender pay gap and women not making it to the C-suites or breaking the glass ceiling, because we don’t look as managerial, we don’t look as strong, we don’t look as smart in the individual imagery of us out there.”

Ms Felix’s trailblazing take on women in the STEM fields hasn’t gone unnoticed. She has been awarded a couple of grants from Getty Images for her work, because the images provider has acknowledged the inequality in the way in which the genders are depicted across its own offerings.

“They’ve recognised that this has been a problem over the past several years and they’ve not been able to find anyone who has actually been able to execute on this brief,” Ms Felix said.

“You don’t really think about it until somebody raises it, which is the heart of unconscious bias.”

So how has Ms Felix seen the experience of women in the STEM change from her own time working in these fields?

“When I started there really weren’t a lot of women around and I just think it’s so positive to now see such large numbers in these fields. Having said that, there’s still a fight and we’re still seeing these women fight for that equal respect,” Ms Felix said.

There’s no doubt that, through the work of Heather Felix, we’ll one day call that “mission accomplished”.

heatherfelixphotography.com