Professorships created exclusively for women won't discriminate against men, Minister claims

By Jess Casey and Lorna Siggins

New professorships created exclusively for women at 12 third level institutes will not discriminate against men, according to the Minister for State for Higher Education.

In a bid to address the gender imbalance at a senior level across the sector, twenty new professorships specifically for women are to be in place by September.

The extra posts, which are focused mainly in the STEM subjects, should help to combat any bias towards women that may take place during the interview process. That is according to Mary Mitchell O’Connor, Minister for State for Higher Education.

“Women are being discriminated against. There's inequality, and women are not being promoted as academics to the highest level.”

The 20 new posts will be in addition to approximately 50 professorial appointments made every year, she added. “For every 100 professors in our universities 76 are men," she told RTÉ. "So they're getting a great chance, you know. They definitely are reaching those [senior] levels but the women aren’t.”

Meanwhile, a leading gender equality expert has said radical tackling of management culture in Irish universities is required to secure equal access. University of Limerick (UL) emeritus professor of sociology Pat O’Connor has welcomed the professorships as a “necessary start”, but says that fundamental action is required for a “culture change”.

Prof O’Connor, author of a number of studies on the issue and Higher Education Authority (HEA) expert group representative on the Government’s taskforce, said she would “prefer to see a clean-up of the management structure” at third level.

There is a “cosy consensus” across universities in relation to access by women to senior posts, her own research suggests. Women have, on average, a three times lesser ‘chance’ than men of accessing a professorship, she found.

Her research, published last month in the journal Irish Educational Studies, also shows that men’s “chance” of a professorship, at 1:5, has varied very little since 2013, while women’s “chance” has improved only marginally, from 1:16 to 1:15. This varies a great deal between universities, ranging from a chance of 1:9 to 1:31.