Women-only professorships a triumph of optics over policy

If the Government really thought gender equality was a priority, it could start by looking at the makeup of the cabinet and their party, writes Margaret Hickey.

The decision by Higher Education Minister Mary Mitchell O’Connor to establish women only professorships in universities and other third-level institutes is quite evidently about optics not policy.

Unless it is the policy of virtue signalling to appease powerful and articulate lobbies and their backers. If she and Taoiseach Leo Varadkar were serious about raising the profile of women in top jobs, they would put their own house in order first.

Or they might just imaginatively apply the proposed ‘acceleration’ of gender equality, as Mr Varadkar described it, to the Fine Gael party and see how it fits. If it doesn’t seem right or appropriate there, then why would it be right anywhere else?

Fine Gael has never had a female leader. Could the next leadership contest be confined to women only? Far too premature, they would say. Not enough women within the parliamentary ranks to choose from. Fair enough, but what is being done to change that?

Lots of rhetoric and promises but no sign of any ‘accelerator’ strategies. On the contrary. Currently the 19 ministers of state, appointed by Mr Varadkar, include a mere three women in their ranks.

That represents a far lower percentage than the percentage of women currently holding full professorships in Irish universities. More pertinently, it represents a much lower percentage than the percentage of female members in the Fine Gael parliamentary party, where there are 11 female members in a cohort of 50. This represents marginally over 20%. Why could he not at least match that ratio in his junior cabinet?

What of his actual cabinet? The 15- strong group has four women and that includes Katherine Zappone, whose appointment was her price for supporting the Government.

So she doesn’t really count, but even with her included, that means the representation of women in the Cabinet stands at just over 25%. The representation of women in professorial positions stands at 24%.

So why the need for interventions to ‘accelerate’ in academia what is happening at an even slower rate within an area directly under the government or under the Taoiseach’s control?

Well, it just shows it comes down to optics, and lobbying too no doubt, and it is as crass a piece of social engineering as one could find. The worst aspect of it is that it does a disservice to women.

If the playing field at entry level to university courses is level, where gender is concerned, if junior academic positions are divided roughly 50/50 between the sexes, if there is due scrutiny and oversight in the process

of appointment, then any imbalances further up the line are most likely due to the choices women make.

There is plenty of research to show that women value work/life balance more highly then men and not just women with young children either. Success at work even stellar success does not deliver happiness and often women get that before men do

Setting aside the question about the sincerity of the minister and Taoiseach, which they should not be allowed forget, is there also a valid question concerning discriminatory attitudes against women?

Attitudes that come into play when top positions are being handed out? Such attitudes may well exist. It is difficult to see how they feed into appointments that are made along objective standards of experience, qualifications and testimonials.

Appointments subject to overview and open to a process of appeal. Choosing the Cabinet is the Taoiseach’s prerogative but we can ask if Mr Varadkar followed best practice in selecting his ministers and junior ministers.

Does the allocation of the portfolios concerned with culture, heritage, and children and youth to women betray a latent sexism? Perhaps the only reason the heavyweight ministries were allocated to men was that he happened to have a match between talent and portfolio that just happened to align with sex too. No other reason.

Best person for the job was a man in each case, even when it meant passing over a number of more experienced women and appointing a fresh-faced 31-year-old to the Department of Health.

Well, if so, that is exactly how it should be. The people of the country deserve the best available person in the job. So too do the students of our universities. If appointments are made on a gender basis, the appointee will always have something to defend. What is true for politicians is true for professors too.

It is true for prime ministers. Just imagine if the beleaguered Theresa May owed her position to affirmative gender action, how much more hostile and vociferous would the braying of her party foes have been in the last week? How much easier would it be to undermine her confidence? The fact that she made it to where she is in as traditional and patriarchal a party as one could find in the developed world has surely made her the confident leader she is.

Her magnificent defiance and resounding self-belief is a tribute to women’s’ ability to make it to the heights of their professions with no more help than a level playing field.

That self-belief is what Mary Mitchell O’Connor’s proposals threaten to erode. It will blur the line between the women who compete on equal terms with their peers and those who get through largely because of their gender.

In the space of a generation, women have gone a long way in the working world. The young and middle-aged female CEOs, academics, consultants, entrepreneurs, bank managers, news anchors, and politicians of today are likely to have had mothers who worked as teachers or nurses or office workers in the 1970s and ’80s.

What remains the same is that most women who work outside the home today continue to occupy what are broadly speaking the caring professions or jobs that leave time and headspace for life outside work.

The real gender gap is most likely a gap in values and outlook. That means of course that women who want to ‘lean in’ and reach professional heights will be more and more in a gender minority as they rise in the ranks. So skewing the arithmetic arbitrarily advantages these women in a massively disproportionate way.

It is simply not fair. Not fair to the men who are passed over because of gender. More unfair still to the students, or clients or patients or citizens who have a right to expect that appointments and promotions are allocated

according to merit.

We have done a lot to rid our public system of jobbery and nepotism and what used to be known as ‘pull’.

Ms Mitchell O’Connor and Mr Varadkar should read up on the resentment, frustration, low morale and underperformance that caused in its day.