The lack of women in senior positions in Irish universities has been labelled a “systemic” issue. Women represent just 19% of professors and no woman to date has ever headed an Irish public university. The Higher Education Authority, which funds higher education and has responsibilities for policy development, is so concerned that it’s launched a national review into gender discrimination to see what can be done.
Ireland is not the only place where women struggle to reach the top jobs, the issue is present in the UK too. Latest figures from the Equality Challenge Unit show that things are gradually changing in the UK, but at a slow rate. Despite women representing nearly half of all academics in UK universities, only 22% of women are in professorial roles, and they make up just over 20% of vice-chancellors.
As a member on the review group panel, here are my four suggestions for how Irish universities can address this issue:
1) Own the problem
Universities will not find organisational solutions as long as they persist in seeing women as “the problem”. A 2009-10 study of men and women who were or had been at the top three levels in Irish public universities found that senior managers attributed much of the blame for women’s under-representation to the women themselves. They focused on their perceived “lack of career planning and ambition”, low self-esteem, “poor political skills”, “inability to market themselves” and lifestyle choices.
Such explanations relieve management of any responsibility for change, but they don’t explain why the numbers of women in senior positions vary so much across Ireland’s seven public universities. Take for example the University of Limerick where 34% of professors are women, while 100km away at the National University of Ireland Galway, the proportion of women at this level is just 14%. Can women change their nature or priorities in 100km? Very unlikely.
Vice-chancellors need to accept that the under-representation of women is an organisational problem and look at how to change their own universities.
2) Tackle the culture
Targets must be set to improve the number of women in senior roles. Advertisements need to move away from implicitly male descriptors.
In Sweden, the proportion of women at vice-chancellor level has increased from 14% in 1990 to 43% in 2010. After analysing 28 recruitment processes, Helen Peterson, associate professor at the University of Gothenburg, concluded that describing the ideal manager as someone with a technical background who is decisive, driven, and an entrepreneur,facilitated the appointments of male vice-chancellors.
Defining the ideal manager as someone who creates trust, listens, facilitates a good working environment, values gender equality, has a modern leadership style, and inspires and infuses enthusiasm in employees, encouraged more women to apply for this senior position.
Changing organisational cultures is difficult in universities since there is no bottom line against which success or failure can be assessed (in contrast to profitability in the business sector). Universities are typically male-dominated organisations. In Ireland, most of the recruitment at senior management level is internal. This creates a conformist system that is self-perpetuating through the hiring of (male) mini-mes.
In a 2015 Irish study of senior management most of the very able women in senior roles thought that their male colleagues saw them as “disruptive”, “intimidating”, “confrontational” or “frightening”. One senior manager said colleagues saw her as “too questioning”, “too challenging”, and were “scared of me in some senses”. The same women believed their female colleagues had very positive perceptions of them.
3) Create independent gender equality structures
Changing power relations is difficult, which is why women need to have a strong presence at the top table, as part of the executive management team that advises the vice-chancellor. They also need to have a good relationship with the chair of the governing board, since that person is critical in the appointment of the vice-chancellor and in calling him/her to account.
These structures need to have close ties with academic gender equality projects , rather than working at the direction of human resources.
4) Get the government on board
The state needs to recognise that diversity has been seen by the EU as critical to research innovation; and by the OECD as vital for economic growth.
In Ireland, the government, directly through its core funding and indirectly through its research funding, values engineering and technology (subject areas that are dominated by male academics) over disciplines dominated by female academics. This increases the likelihood that senior management positions will be filled by men.
In Sweden, the state requires university governing boards to show how gender equality has been taken into account in the appointment of a vice-chancellor. In Ireland, state guidelines dating back more than 20 years, requiring ministers to ensure that at least 40% of all nominations to state boards are women, have been ignored by all but one university – the National University of Ireland, Maynooth.
The National Strategy for Higher Education, which maps its future to 2030, makes no reference to gender. The under-representation of women in senior positions and the fact that no woman has ever headed an Irish public university is not even noted. Such implicit male bias needs to be recognised and challenged.
State funding through the Higher Educational Authority needs to be linked to improvements in the gender profile of senior academics and managers in universities, which would be a strong motivator, given current austerities.
If universities are really about ideas, under-utilising women’s potential is not an option.
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