We cannot build AI-enabled industry without women at the centre of it
Cori Stewart's International Women's Day keynote: women are 23% of Australian manufacturing, and that has to change.
ARM Hub CEO Professor Cori Stewart delivered the International Women's Day keynote at the Women in Manufacturing Breakfast hosted by the Queensland Government last week, noting the sector's potential and highlighting the critical role women will play moving forward.
Manufacturing is not one industry among many. It is the industry that makes every other industry possible. We cannot build the next generation of AI and robotics-enabled industry without women at the centre of it.
Professor Cori Stewart
Stewart, who leads Australia's advanced robotics and manufacturing adoption centre, drew on her own journey to illustrate how visible role models shape what young women believe is possible, particularly in technical fields.
That choice wasn't about my ability. It was about what I could imagine. And what I could imagine was limited by what I could see.
Professor Cori Stewart
It is a dynamic, she says, that plays out across the sector. Women currently make up around 23 per cent of Australia's manufacturing workforce, a number that is growing but still well short of where the industry needs it to be, particularly as AI and automation reshape what manufacturing looks like and who it needs.
We're seeing AI move off the screen and into the physical world, into factories, production lines, operating theatres, and paddocks. This is an extraordinary moment to be entering this industry.
Professor Cori Stewart
Stewart was direct about what holds progress back: rarely a single dramatic event, more often accumulated friction, limited flexibility, absent mentorship, and a culture that was not built with women in mind.
The manufacturers who have figured out flexible work are winning the talent war. The ones who haven't are losing people they cannot replace, and many of those people are women.
Professor Cori Stewart
The message to industry leaders was unambiguous: diverse teams make better decisions, and the research supports it.
What you give, in culture, in opportunity, in the way you welcome people who don't yet fit the template, determines what this industry gains.
Professor Cori Stewart
With Queensland companies already building autonomous mining systems and AI-driven robotics for agriculture and healthcare, the stakes are not abstract. The next wave of Australian industry is being built now. The question is who gets to build it.
The panel: Teagan Dowler, Founder of The BCW; Professor Cori Stewart; Emily Pullen, CEO of Jim Jerky; and Zahlee Wheeler, apprentice at Allweld Manufacturing.