UK: Promotion ladder too hard to climb

Women in British universities hit the proverbial glass ceiling at the senior level. Latest figures from the Higher Education Statistics Agency show that women account for 42% of lecturers and researchers but only 16.5% make it to professorial level and just 16% reach the top job of vice-chancellor or rector.

The academic pyramid is based on an administrative and clerical workforce of whom 83% are women. While 45% of managers are women, this rapidly tapers off so that at the top, only 18 of the 131 vice-chancellor members of Universities UK (UUK) are female.

Of 168 British higher education institutions, 27 are led by women. There are no female vice-chancellors in Wales or Northern Ireland and, although the majority of women head the newer universities, Cambridge broke new ground when in 2003 Professor Alison Richard became its 344th vice-chancellor – the first full-time woman in the post.

A Universities UK spokesman said: “Universities are committed to providing equal opportunity in academia. The sector has made substantial progress in recent years, but we are not complacent and recognise that there is always more that can be done. Redressing gender imbalances in academia, such as at senior level, is a long term goal for the sector.”

UUK established an equality challenge unit in 2001 to promote equality for staff in higher education. The unit’s chief executive, Nicola Dandridge, said the gender promotion gap in sciences was especially acute, with women comprising only 7% of professors.

Dandridge said the situation would not improve in the near future as fewer than one in four science lecturers were women, and women made up only 14% of senior lecturers and researchers. She said the unit was channelling much of its energies into getting more women to study science at university, adding that schools also had to take up the challenge to get more girls to study science subjects.

Higher education institutions have to comply with a ‘gender equality duty’ under legislation introduced early last April to ensure that they do not discriminate on grounds of gender, race and disability. The government asked the universities to publish plans setting out how they intended to obey the law.

The legislation aims to help women close the pay gap as well as help them up the promotion ladder. Dandridge said this would be a slow, incremental process – extremely slow in some areas.