economics. unfortunately, both in general and for female students, economics is not exactly popular in australia. the previous graph showed that the decline in the female share of tertiary students in management and commerce over the past decade has only been marginal, and the student population is reasonably balanced between males and females. but for economics, the share of female university students has always been much lower and appears to have fallen further more recently. even more concerning is that total student numbers in economics appear to have fallen at our universities over the past couple of decades, though some data show a small pick - up more recently. the picture is even worse at school level. taking new south wales just as an example, fewer students are doing economics in year 12, and a declining proportion of that declining number are female ( graph 10 ). from what we understand, when business studies subjects were introduced, they expanded at the expense of economics. most of that shift happened in the 1990s. i can ’ t help wondering if the experience of the early 1990s recession, or the popular discussion at the time about ‘ economic rationalism ’ made economics somehow uncool. or maybe business studies was seen as easier for students, or for teachers ; or maybe general subjects are seen as better for employability. we just don ’ t know. at least we can say that it seems that the global financial crisis, which is considered in some quarters to represent a failure of economics as a discipline, did not have the same effect. in fact 10 / 14 bis central bankers'speeches we hear from some students, young and old, who were inspired to study economics by the crisis. maybe that has something to do with the small pick - up in total university student numbers recently. of course, it is not essential to have studied economics at school to select it as a major at university. studying mathematics can be another path. to succeed in university economics studies, studying mathematics and statistics is actually very helpful. but this decline in school economics is a disquieting picture. there is already a voluminous literature on the sex imbalance in the economics profession. equality of the sexes is one of the areas where new data, and big data, have been instrumental in replacing pontification with evidence - based insight. we can no longer dismiss suggestions that treatment or representation of females are subject to negative biases and other disadvantages. from analysis of movie dialogue to matched - resume studies, evidence of bias now has statistical weight. one piece of positive news

technological solutions for operational problems, but operational restrictions cannot come to the aid of technological problems. in other words, problems and issues relating to the technology have to be sorted by means of changes in the technological solution itself. all of us must have experienced vendors who have provided technology solutions suggesting that some procedures or that some of the environmental aspects could be modified to suit the technological process which has been implemented. this is a case for certain failure. the case of a new bank which commenced its operations by dispensing away with the savings bank pass books had to beat a hasty retreat and give the option to its customers by providing a technological solution - customers could take print outs of their statement of accounts at any time from their own system! • yet another premise is that the process of change can be forced upon people. it is now widely accepted that change has to be from within and external forces only facilitate or accelerate the process of change. the old adage of ‘ you can take the horse to the water but cannot make it drink ’ is relevant in this context. a case in point pertains to the use of cards by customers of banks. a decade ago, banks had to offer incentives to customers to use cards for their transactions, and there was general reluctance to use the card by even the discerning customer. today, customers have realised that the cards offer better convenience and have changed over to large scale usage of the cards, based on their conviction. that the direct selling agents employed by banks hastened the process of migration is an accepted fact, but this was not the major factor in the change process. • perhaps the most important premise relating to change pertains to the relationship between security and stability. if a change process has to be successful, there has to be a harmonious balance between the perceived levels of insecurity and instability by the participants in the change process. even if one of these factors has a higher perceived weightage, the change becomes difficult to implement. in a nutshell, it is essential that managing change is taken as a very serious task with the complete commitment and support from the top levels of all organisations. this is particularly more relevant in banks, where personnel manning the front desk are the most important link between the bank and the customer can make or break a change. a bank staff telling a customer ‘ this new system implemented by my bank takes a very long time ; please wait for updating your pass book ’ or tells ‘ we have moved to a core