This week we’re celebrating International Women’s Day 2025 coming up on 8 March by showcasing outstanding individuals who are helping to shape Australia’s geospatial sector.

In this interview we speak with Kate Fairlie, Land Administration Specialist and Project Director with Land Equity International.

Please tell us about your current role and responsibilities.

We’re a consulting firm that works exclusively in the international development space on all things land. At the moment, I’m working on projects such as affordable land and housing in Vanuatu; digitalising (and decentralising) Nepal’s land registration and valuation data and services; and identifying the role for surveyors in improving women’s access to land.

How did you get into this field and what attracted you to it?

I’ve perhaps had an unconventional pathway through surveying. I started out wanting to map Mars and went through my degree as perhaps the only student who actually wanted to be a geodesist — or maybe that’s an ‘areodist’ (thanks Google). But I became distracted by travelling… going on exchange to Sweden during university, then taking an internship with Shell in the Netherlands and a graduate position with them in Scotland. Then from around 2006, I became involved with the International Federation of Surveyors (FIG) which ultimately led me to the UN and then back to Wollongong with Land Equity International!

So perhaps what attracted me most to surveying was the versatility — it’s a career that could take me to the North Sea oil rigs, positioning and decommissioning platforms; but then also to the United Nations in Nairobi advocating for youth access to land; and then again, back to Wollongong where one day I’m researching the legal framework for carbon rights and the next day maybe mortgage finance options for female seasonal workers.

Are there any personal qualities or attributes that are helpful to have in this field?

Look, we always talk about maths, but really surveyors should be great communicators. Hear me out. In my work I like to think of myself as a technical translator — we need to understand how the laws and administrative systems to manage land work, but fundamentally these systems only work if people use them. A ‘culture of land registration,’ like we have in Australia, isn’t created overnight, and it isn’t (solely) created by developing a whizz-bang digital twin. People, landowners, customers, have to understand why they should register and what will happen if they don’t, and they have to trust the government (or other entity) they are registering with.

That’s just one example. But I think it’s the same with surveying businesses in Australia — the better we’re able to ‘translate’ our services to directly speak to client needs, the better we’ll be at developing a ‘just call a surveyor’ culture.

We need more women in the geospatial sector. Do you have any ideas?

Yes, of course! Number one, every surveying firm can ‘adopt’ a pre-school, primary or high school and commit to an annual visit. Shout out to Woolpert, who sent a young professional along with me to visit my son’s kindy class. We talked to around 25, five-to-six-year-olds about why we measure, how lasers work and how we can have maps for different purposes. Woolpert had some great balsawood planes that the kids made, and then used the total station to measure how far we could fly them. Maths in Surveying days are great but can only reach so many kids. Adopt-a-school would add greater reach.

Number two, metrics. There have been a lot of initiatives to get women into surveying, but I’m not so sure we’ve spent the effort evaluating the success of these initiatives. We all know the value of good data! Let’s collect it and target our efforts where we can best see success.

Number three, retention! I think we can all recognise some leaky pipeline issues in the profession. Addressing retention will mean more women staying in the profession, and more women visible to others. There are so many facets to retention though, and DEI has unfortunately lost a bit of international backing recently thanks to a certain leader whose name rhymes with ‘chump’. There’s a whole other discussion to have around that (retention, that is).

In saying that, women remain the minority in the surveying profession. We’re burdened enough in just proving ourselves day by day and ‘representing women’ in so many ways. So the burden of ‘increasing the number of women surveyors’ shouldn’t fall exclusively to us. Number four, then, is, everyone takes responsibility.

Is there anything else you would like to add?

It’s great to have all the breakfasts and luncheons and inspiring speakers during International Women’s Day, but we need all those in privileged positions to step up and do more to achieve equality. This means men stepping up for women. (And white women stepping up for indigenous women, and so on and so forth.) Feminism is like land — it’s fundamentally about power. And it’s everyone’s responsibility to think about how power and bias play into their positions and their work.

For example, there are huge linkages between intimate partner violence and land ownership — so what training should surveyors receive to play a role in identifying and supporting victims? And hold the ‘that’s not my role’ thought — let’s recognise this as a problem and see what steps we can take to address it.

Supporting women, and other possible minority groups, in the field and on site is another. No longer should the challenges of in-the-field periods or on-site menopause be a women’s domain only. We all have mothers! It’s time to educate yourself and those around you and actively create inclusive spaces; not wait for women to ask.

And finally, I hope everyone has seen the Victorian Yoorrook Justice Commission Land, Sky and Water hearings. The purpose of these was to hear from “Traditional Owners, the Co-Chairs of the First Peoples’ Assembly of Victoria, the Minister for the Environment, the Minister for Treaty and First Peoples, the Victorian Surveyor General and academics on injustices against First Peoples related to land, sky and waters.” Craig Sandy, Surveyor General of Victoria, made an historic apology.

Hopefully this is just the first step, as there’s so much more we as a surveying profession can do to recognise our role in past and ongoing injustices, and support the achievement of reconciliation in the future.

Oh, and register for FIG Working Week 2025 + Locate25 in Brisbane. If you haven’t been to a FIG meeting before, it will totally transform your perspective. And if you have, then I’m sure you’ve already booked your ticket.