The proportion of female professors in UK universities is too low. The same can be said of women in any full-time, permanent academic position within higher education. This may come as a surprise to many, given that we are talking about a profession rhetorically committed to equality, fairness and opportunity for all. Don’t believe the hype.
There is a fundamental mismatch between the declared aims of universities as employers and the HR practices that they implement. The official message is that the figures need to change, that the balance needs to be redressed, and that the culture needs to shift. In practice, that message is distorted by recruitment, retention and promotion procedures that entrench the status quo.
Much of the sector has yet to address the crucial issue of quantity versus quality when it comes to research. At present, those who take parental leave (almost always women) are disadvantaged by a system that places value on the number of publications on a CV. As long as quantity remains the touchstone of achievement in so many institutions, there will never be equality of opportunity.
That is not to suggest that women should get an easier ride; just a fair shot at the (professorial) title. Being a parent of young children does not make your research any worse, but it does mean there will be less of it. Until last year, all but a few weeks of parental leave could be granted to mothers but not to fathers, meaning that women, to date, have spent more time on childcare and less on research than their male counterparts. The professional criteria against which both are judged remain identical.
Adjusting appointment and promotion criteria to account for the fact that fewer outputs of the requisite quality can be produced in a shorter period of time is not to lower standards. Imagine a sporting contest in which one team is allowed 35 overs and the other team is allowed 50 overs, but in which the object remains to score the most runs. This would rightly be regarded as just not cricket.
One of the major achievements of the 20th century was to give women choices. One of the major challenges of the 21st century will be to indemnify them against the costs of those choices. While men disproportionately occupy positions of power and decision-making, however, it is difficult to see how this will happen. If the ability to have it all is your birthright, this issue is unlikely to shine brightly on your radar.
This is a cultural problem and one which extends far beyond the ivory tower. An aggravating factor within academia, however, is the term “parental leave”. Academics crave “leave” as space to think and to write, unfettered by running departments, advising on policy, poring over accounts, organising conferences, applying for funding, marking, writing lectures, supervising theses and so on. It is something to be savoured when you have it, and envied when others do.
There is a sense amongst some, though, that parental leave amounts to much the same thing: a restful, productive and enjoyable period of time away from teaching and administration.
In fact, parental leave is, in this sense, anti-leave. From a physical perspective, it is not at all restful, from a professional perspective, it is not at all productive (no, it is not possible to fit in worthwhile research during nap times). As for enjoyable, that depends on the individual; some love it, some hate it. If the latter, this is usually because they miss work or fear, with good reason, that they are being left behind by their peers in the office.
Whichever it is, there is little real choice in the matter; biology and legal constraints dictate that women must step back from the day job to nurture miniature human beings, who are as potent and promising as they are dependent and defenceless.
There is, perhaps, light at the end of this centuries-long tunnel: shared parental leave, introduced in April 2015 allows both parents to share 50 weeks of leave and 37 weeks of pay between them in the first year of their child’s life. If this means that the impact of career breaks starts to be felt by men, it will probably be taken very seriously indeed.
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