Sir, – Women are seriously underrepresented at senior levels in Irish third-level educational institutions, as outlined by Catherine McGuinness (Opinion, February 19th).
The underlying reasons for this must be clearly identified before solutions can be implemented and I am glad to see that this analysis is now underway.
One serious difficulty faced by many women in dealing with the competitive academic promotion process is already clearly understood. Each child born to a female university lecturer calls for one year’s break from academic work on maternity leave. However, the number and quality of publications in academic journals is a key determinant when candidates are evaluated for academic promotion and, if you take two years out from your research in your 30s, this obviously will seriously handicap your chances of succeeding in the promotion stakes against competitors who have not taken any time out.
A fair formula could easily be devised to neutralise this publication-number handicap now placed on women who take maternity leave for the very laudable purposes of bearing children and getting them off to a good start in life. – Yours, etc, WILLIAM REVILLE Emeritus Professor of Biochemistry UCC, Cork.
Sir, – Catherine McGuinness is confident that the taskforce appointed to solve under-representation of women at senior level in NUI Galway will succeed. As a woman and a professor, I do not share her certainty, but I do hope for real change.
Reviewing and reporting is an all too familiar corporate approach to dealing with profound problems. Putting university women under the microscope to see why they cannot conform to male managerial agenda for the workplace is not the way forward. Women in Irish universities have already had to suffer the indignity of being told by a commissioned report that under-confidence is at the heart of their failure. This patronising rhetoric has deepened with the loss of Irish universities as places of enlightenment and their ongoing transformation into remotely-controlled business campuses allied to commerce and industry.
In my experience, university women are not lacking in confidence but in opportunity to integrate female values into the operation of the boardroom.
There is need to feminise all areas of university life, not by fixing women to fit with pre-ordained male strategies, but by the incorporation of female approaches to work. This includes tackling the model of achievement that underscores promotion in universities.
Women bring new questions to bear on the 21st-century university: what constitutes meaningful work, what kind of work is valued, and how much work is enough? These are not questions that are currently heard or addressed in university boardrooms because the answers have already been decided.
It is hoped that the NUI Galway-appointed taskforce will speak with women who have not yet achieved seniority, and to those who have, so that it can begin to understand what it takes for a woman to succeed, to any extent, in a long-established male academic culture that keeps a tight grip on the destinies of our universities.– Yours, etc, Prof ELIZABETH FITZPATRICK School of Geography and Archaeology, NUI Galway, Galway.