University College Dublin is fortunate to have some outstanding women academics on its staff. Among them were some of the names on the petition this week to the UCD Governing Authority, asking it not to ratify the latest round of promotions because of alleged sex discrimination.

People like Dr Kathleen Lynch of the Equality Studies Centre and Dr Ailbhe Smyth of the Women's Education Research and Resource Centre are recognised for their contributions both to the college and to wider Irish society.

However, like many outstanding women, they are also feminists and not afraid to campaign vociferously on issues of gender equality and discrimination. Dr Lynch and Dr Smyth, in particular, have a history of taking on the university authorities to obtain resources for their centres. Their combative feminism leads many of their more conservative male colleagues to view them with some antipathy.

Whether that antipathy affected their chances of promotion to associate professors' jobs this week is something which cannot be known. UCD registrar Dr Caroline Hussey was adamant that all procedures were followed "meticulously and transparently." Twenty associate professors - only one of them a woman - who had been chosen from a short list of around 40 prepared by the various faculties were approved by the Governing Authority.

The three criteria for promotion were academic publications, quality of teaching, and administrative experience.

According to Dr Hussey, one factor affecting this and recent promotion rounds was that many senior lecturers had been waiting for 10 years or more for advancement due to a freeze on promotions caused by financial stringency and strict Higher Education Authority rules in the 1980s.

Ailbhe Smyth has a trenchantly different view. It took her nearly 30 years to be promoted to senior lecturer last year and she believes her radical feminist politics "must be a contributory factor in my non-promotion, because my academic record is better than good. "The position of women throughout the university is being impeded by its consistent refusal to promote productive senior academics who have strong radical views on issues of feminism and equality. "In the past 10-15 years, as equal opportunity has become an area of high activity everywhere else, the two most resistant institutions in the country have been the universities and the judiciary."

The research, much of it done by Dr Smyth herself, appears to support this conclusion. Her 1983-84 study found that only one per cent of professors, six per cent of assistant (and associate) professors and seven per cent of senior lecturers were women.

She concluded that women academics were "beyond all shadow of doubt the victims of a complex system of indirect discrimination, which the system itself, or more precisely those who control it, have taken no steps to combat, if they are even aware of it."

Her statistics were confirmed in a 1987 HEA study which found "striking imbalances" between men and women academics. It concluded that there was "a marked concentration of female academics in the junior lecturing grades", with women comprising only 5.5 per cent of professors, associate professors and senior lecturers.

In 1993-94 Dr Smyth revisited her data and found only marginal improvements: four per cent of professors were now women; the same six per cent were assistant professors; and 12 per cent were senior lecturers. At a time when nearly 50 per cent of students were female, only 17 per cent of academic staff, overwhelmingly at the lower end of the scale, were women.

She found that in the University of Limerick, Dublin City University and Maynooth there were no women professors at all. This has now improved to one in Maynooth and two in Limerick.

At a conference in 1995, a senior lecturer at Trinity College Dublin, Ms Anne Clune, assessed the various measures taken to redress gender inequality and found some of them wanting.

She said that in most universities the numbers of senior women academics was so small that the single woman on most interview and promotion boards tended to be the same person again and again, an exercise in tokenism which usually left the woman concerned totally exhausted.

She also told the extraordinary story of four jobs being filled in one swoop in her English department in 1995, all by men. When she asked why the opportunity had not been taken to redress a growing gender imbalance in a department where the majority of students were women, she was told that because Trinity was an equal opportunities employer "no question of gender could ever be entertained".

However, TCD probably has a longer tradition of women in senior posts, a legacy of educated Protestant "blue stockings" going back to early this century.

Senior women academics there say there is little of the "you won't get promoted without a skirt" muttering that is sometimes heard among men in the common room bar at Belfield.

Prof Aine Hyland of University College Cork's education department, confirms that constantly sitting on boards as a token woman professor can be wearing. She points out that UCC's four women professors will be reduced to two in September by retirements. She agrees that "in spite of all the equality legislation there have been no significant changes in the proportion of women at senior level in universities in the past decade".

A recent report from the excellent equality committee of the National University of Ireland, Galway found that the proportion of women academics there, at 16.5 per cent, was one of the lowest in the country. It was 20 per cent at UCC, just under 21 per cent at TCD, just under 24 per cent at UCD and 24.5 per cent at Maynooth.

Another problem is that there are few laid-down criteria for measuring the quality of teaching in universities, a key area in which everyone from senior administrators to radical feminist lecturers agree women shine in comparison to men.

Studies have found that women academics often neglect their research - so important for promotion - to concentrate on teaching.

Anne Clune stresses that we need "something more than good intentions and nice policies" to deal with the extremely slow pace of change. She wants an HEA-funded study covering all aspects of women's employment in third-level institutions, followed by a legislatively-backed "positive action programme" with stated targets, funding and penalties for non-compliance.

The success of such measures, she warns, will "depend on individuals being prepared to persist, against the odds and sometimes at the expense of their own careers, but the evidence is that this kind of persistence, though painful, is both essential and effective".