Date published: 2008/02/28
The BBC says:
The share of female professors has edged up slightly, but they are still out-numbered more than five to one by their male counterparts, figures show.
Some 17.5% of professors in the UK were women in 2006-7 - up from 16.7% the year before, the Higher Education Statistics Agency shows.
And 36.8% of senior lecturers and researchers were women.
The Universities and College Union said there was no reason why more women should not be in top university jobs.
UCU general secretary Sally Hunt said: "Fair, open and transparent recruitment and promotion procedures are in everyone's interests, not just women.
...
Nearly two-thirds (or 62.6%) of non-academic staff were female.
Well, it's a bit silly to look at one year's figure as indicating anything much about anything. But it also underestimates what is really going on. So say that a professor stays in the job on average 20 years. And suppose that the total number of professors stayed constant, so that new ones were just replacing old ones. And suppose that 10% of the old professors were women (since in the past, the number of women professors was even lower). Then the percentage of women amongst new professors turns out to be 26%. Of course the estimate of 20 years and 10% were made up, but they show the problem with looking merely at a long-term average, which almost by definition takes a long time to change.
Although the UCU asks for "fair, open and transparent" procedures, what they really mean is that more women better be hired or else. So you always have to wonder, how many of these new professors are hired because it was a "fair, open and transparent" procedure and how many because universities feel under pressure from organisations like UCU to hire more women? (Well, the general hiring procedure of universities is open to question. Cambridge has its fair share of people who were hired it seems more because they had a certain personality rather than any particular talent.)
The idea in the story is that of course we must have at least half the professors being women, otherwise it is blatant sexual discrimination against women. So does the BBC (or anyone else) consider that it is "good" or "bad" that over half the non-academic staff are female? So is this blatant sexual discrimination against men? Or is it again blatant sexual discrimination against women, since of course the academic middle class (like the BBC) look down their noses at non-academic staff and so consider these jobs to be negative, not positive like professorships? Well, it's pretty obvious which, since all such stories have to be anti-male, so of course there can be no sexual discrimination against men, only against women.
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