Terri's continuous pursuit of reinvention, against all odds
- kirranicolle
- 2 hours ago
- 7 min read
Medical research, information technology, professional practice, film production, motherhood, novel writing and project management. The Salvation Army’s IT PMO Manager Terri Dentry has done it all, and she isn’t stopping anytime soon. After being told as a young mother with an evolving career in research that she should “go home and look after her family” and being forced to seek legal action for unequal treatment, through her various roles and projects, Terri has continued to fight for the equality of women and those on the margins.
With today being the International Day of Women and Girls in Science, KIRRALEE NICOLLE caught up with Terri to find out what drives her, what the challenges have been, and why encouraging women towards science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) careers is not just an optional extra, but a foundation for coping with life's challenges.
In her role at The Salvation Army, Terri Dentry PhD works to ensure the women in her team feel as entitled as their male counterparts to advancement, pay equity and respect at work. Yet this conviction – that women deserve equal opportunities – has not always been easy for her to uphold.
When Terri was 21 years old, she discovered she was pregnant with her first child after several medical setbacks that doctors had suggested would lead to Terri being unable to have children of her own. This was exciting news, and the circumstances were all positive ones. Except for one thing. Terri was an undergraduate science student in 1980s Melbourne. This was a situation which Terri calls “really rare”.
“Everyone was saying to me, ‘You must be joking’,” she says. “[But] I just decided I was going to do it all.”
And Terri did. She not only finished her undergraduate degree a few years later but then began her honours degree while pregnant with her second child, due in the middle of the year. She was fortunate to find a supervisor who was supportive, and let her bring a newborn into the university, where she could utilise a centre which provided affordable childcare during classes and research time. But she still says it was really tough.
“Honestly, it was rough,” she says. “I had to have quite a few different run-ins with people. People weren't very happy with the fact that I was a mother, and I was working hard to get a scholarship to do a PhD.”
She says being a mother in this setting meant having very few people on side. She says there was a perception that she was taking the place of someone else – someone without children.
“I [would walk] through the corridors at the university and I'd have senior academic staff as well as people who didn't even know me just saying, ‘Why are you even here? Why aren't you at home with your children?’
“It was really rough.”
In fact, it was so rough that Terri was forced to initiate a court case, as she discovered at the end of her honours year that despite getting consistently high results, she had missed out on a Commonwealth PhD scholarship she felt she was entitled to receive.
“They marked me down so that I wouldn't get a scholarship,” she says. “Only the top five people out of 20 got scholarships, and the other 15 missed out. It was very competitive back then. I believed I was one of the top five, but I was ranked seventh out of the 20 when the final rankings came out and so I had to fight my way for it.”
“I went to equal opportunities court, and won the case, because I showed that they actually had done it deliberately because I was a female with children.”
"Women and men bring a different way of seeing things to the table. They have to really understand that from each other. You need women because they think about things in a different way."
However, even though Terri got awarded the First Class Honours she deserved, she still missed out on the Commonwealth scholarship. Not to be outdone, though, she decided to go one better: a fellowship, which she describes as an “even more competitive field vying for funding to undertake a PhD”.
“I was really lucky to get a fellowship at the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research,” Terri says. “I had done incredibly well [in my honours year], it's just that they had marked me down. Ludwig had access to all the actual results, and then in my interview, I explained to them what happened, and I think that they were just really supportive too.
“I ended up getting one of the two fellowships offered that year.”
But then, Terri became pregnant with her third child, and with a marriage breakdown and the responsibilities of home life, research became too difficult. She says 18-hour days in the lab led her to “step away from the bench” for a while. Instead, she found a role as a Project Officer for the Deputy Vice Chancellor of Research and Development at RMIT University. Terri says she had little experience in that type of role, but she says the Deputy Vice Chancellor heard about her background, and responded “’if you've done all that and you've managed to come here to this interview with kids at home, you can do this job’”.
From RMIT, Terri then progressed to project management roles across multiple industries, ending up at Victoria University leading a large, expansive program of work for interprofessional practice across the universities ten health disciplines. This area sparked her interest, and she decided to return to working on a PhD, this time working with refugees and asylum seekers facing chronic pain and PTSD symptoms. Terri, along with her team, led a study which trialled placing physiotherapists and psychologists in the same room as a client, and the outcomes were part of revolutionising care for vulnerable populations. Throughout the project, Terri got to know her trial participants and their complex needs and says seeing so many be so happy and free of pain at the end of the study was a “joyous” thing.
“[Having] this very holistic help and having multiple people working with them really helped them to feel like the team really cared about all their needs,” she says. “It was great.”
Even with a full-time job at The Salvation Army, Terri has continued her post-doctoral research, with multiple grants across different institutions. She says in her job with the Salvos, she uses her skills learned in academia “every single day”. Her background also includes a stint owning a software development company, which gave her grounding in the day-to-day challenges of technology.
“What we do in my team is we ask questions and solve problems,” she says. “That's all we do all day long. We just seek to solve problems. To me, that's very close to my research work.
“The same way that we taught the practitioners to work together with the patients is exactly what I do with my teams. I teach them how to work together, how to talk the same language and understand each other, and understand each other's way of working.
“It makes a huge difference to the way they work.”
She says her focus is to assist team members to “lean in” and help each other fulfil their roles, ensuring that there are no gaps in IT service delivery. She is also implementing the “cultivation of insight”, where members of a team seek to see their work from another’s perspective, and in doing so drive innovation. She says she is one of a “very small handful” of women in IT and is proud to be working in a team with a growing number of other women who she says she is “working very hard” to encourage to see themselves as equal to the men.
“We're trying to help and understand each other, so that we actually know how to care for the other person,” she says. “And women and men bring a different way of seeing things to the table. They have to really understand that from each other. You need women because they think about things in a different way.”
Additionally, Terri has worked as a Producer on independent and Australian-funded films, mostly short animated productions, one of which was nominated for an Oscar in 2015. She has also worked as a film judge on award panels and spent many years working as a journalist in the film industry, writing features on production for magazines.
She has continued to write and is now working on a novel, together with a Professor at the University of Toronto, that showcases how her research work is important in everyday life. She says her creative work and the enduring power of story has been just as important to her life and personal development as her career in STEM has been. She says each of us is bound to need to overhaul ourselves throughout our lives, and her creative pursuits have carried her through many of those reinvention points.
“What they have done is helped me to re-evaluate,” Terri says. “Each time, it was really difficult to get through to the next stage and reinvent myself. Going through stories and understanding new perspectives – that really helps you to actually make the change, to work out where you need to be next.
“And I think we all need to do that.”
Now, Terri is the proud mother of four daughters and grandmother to five, and she says her daughters have “been on the journey” with her throughout her career – visiting film festivals, attending laboratories and learning how to perform dissections.
“Showing them that they can do whatever they wanted to do has always been really important to me,” Terri says.
“They need to see all the things that you do and be part of that, so you can show them what they can imagine [for] themselves.”
