THE teaching profession is becoming increasingly feminised, according to a new study presented to the ASTI, but women are still under-represented in top jobs. Unveiling her results, Leonie Warren, a teacher in Holy Child Community School, Sallynoggin, Dublin, told a recent ASTI seminar that "the process of feminisation of the teaching profession is progressing rapidly" particularly among teachers recruited in the past seven to ten years.
Warren, who did the research as part of a study for the Department of Education, believes the situation for women at the top of the profession is not improving. "It's getting worse," she says. "If you look at our global figures they're not too bad because of the number of religious, but if you look at the co-ed and vocational schools it's still very low."
Of those on the first 10 points of the salary scale in primary schools, 87 per cent are female. In voluntary secondary schools the figure is 73 per cent, falling to 71 per cent in community colleges and 67 per cent in community and comprehensive schools.
There is bad news for women when it comes to appointments to senior positions. While 72 per cent of male teachers over the age of 60 at primary level are principals, only 21 per cent of female teachers over 60 occupy principal positions. Similarly, almost half of all female teachers at primary level retire without having occupied a "post of responsibility", while only 14 per cent of male teachers retire without occupying a similar post.
In the vocational sector, where appointment to posts of responsibility is based on merit, the proportion of female post-holders has increased in the past 10 years but the middle-management group of principal vice-principal and `A' post-holders is even more male-dominated than in the primary sector. The ratio is three male post-holders to each female post-holder, except in Dublin where the ratio is two-to-one.
In community and comprehensive schools, over 60 per cent of males hold posts of responsibility by the age of 60 compared with only 37 per cent of females. Despite this, the number of female applications for vice-principalships in community and comprehensive schools has almost doubled since 1992 - from 22 per cent to 43 per cent.
Warren also asks some difficult questions which she believes need to be examined by organisations involved in appointments. Do female teachers get the same encouragement as males and is there positive-feedback following unsuccessful applications? Are interview boards balanced in terms of gender rather than simply having a token woman on the board, or no woman at all? Are interview boards aware of female career patterns and lifecycles?
Finally, Warren raises the thorny question - do candidates become familiar to interviewers through sporting or other organisations in which women tend to be the minority?
Warren is currently trying to develop training courses for female teachers but she believes that this alone will not be sufficient to redress the imbalance.
