State enterprise sector shows the way for gender balance

The glass ceiling that holds women back from managerial advancement is as impenetrable as ever, with new research matching data from a decade ago. Everyone accepts that women make excellent rank and file workers but too few of them go on to become managers and leaders in their workplaces. It is as true for politics as for academia with women tending to hold fewer than one in five of the senior posts.

The reasons why this is so have been debated for many decades, and from time to time efforts are made to correct this gross gender imbalance that the European Parliament considers an infringement of human rights.

Figures offered by the Centre for the Advancement of Women in Politics at Queen's University Belfast suggest that over the years the percentage of women in the Irish cabinet typically floats between just over 10 per cent but doesn't exceed 20 per cent. The percentage of women in the Irish cabinet in the mid-1990s was 12.5 per cent, and rose to about 20 per cent during the string of Fianna Fáil-led governments prior to the Government taking office. Queen's calculates that female involvement is currently back to 13 per cent.

Women need to hold at least a third of seats in order to have influence within a parliamentary setting, according to a report from the Oireachtas Library and Research Service from 2010 looking at women's participation in EU parliaments. The European Parliament set a figure of 40 per cent to ensure that at least that parliament would allow for a real female voice, and it is relatively close to achieving that, according to figures up to last October, with women accounting for 36 per cent of parliamentarians in Strasbourg.

The Oireachtas researchers looked at individual countries and found that Sweden had the most women, 46.4 per cent, in its lower house with South Africa coming in second with 44.5 per cent. Finland was fifth with 40 per cent and Denmark completed the top 10 with 38 per cent. Eight of the top 10 countries ensure balance by imposing quotas with Finland and Denmark the exceptions, and the Oireachtas researchers quote commentators who argue that quotas are the way to go.

Many countries resist the idea of fixed quotas to force balance and successive governments have stayed away from them. If not done on a national basis then it comes down to political parties but balance won’t emerge from them. “In general, the political parties are the gatekeepers to gender balance in political decision making because they control the nominations. It has been calculated that 47 per cent of Irish women have no female TD to represent them, whereas 100 per cent of Irish men have a male TD to represent them,” the Oireachtas researchers write in their report.

The universities also struggle to achieve gender balance but have not reached it. Across the higher education area women only hold 18 per cent of all professorships and 27 per cent of associate professorships, according to figures from Prof Pat O'Connor of the University of Limerick. She has a recent book on the issue, Management and Gender in Higher Education. The EU average comes in at about 20 per cent of professorships held by women.

Research funding
The higher education sector is the cockpit for research, enterprise and innovation activity, and the sector has moved to align itself with the Government's thinking when it comes to enterprise activity and innovation. And with this in mind one might assume that it would be men in grey suits all the way in our state enterprise sector.

Unusually, it is the reverse with women holding key positions in areas that will be very important for Ireland when it comes to research funding and sourcing finance from Horizon 2020.

Horizon 2020 has a €79 million seven-year budget and the Government hopes to win €1.25 billion. The office responsible for achieving this, the Horizon2020 Office (horizon2020.ie), is headed by Imelda Lambkin, the woman who also led the charge with the previous FP7 funding programme. She was instrumental in ensuring that the then €600 million target was met and exceeded.

Meanwhile Enterprise Ireland has a new CEO, Julie Sinnamon. She was an in-house selection so she knows the territory and is expert when it comes to global business activity and exports. She is now a central player in efforts to advance the Government's policy on enterprise and innovation.

Over at the Irish Research Council Orla Feely chairs the board and Eucharia Meehan is the director. Both highly motivated, they are ensuring that the €40 million plus available to the council in support of the research community is well spent in areas that will further Ireland's aims to develop a knowledge economy.

It can only be a good thing that the gender balance has swung in the opposite direction for a change and we can benefit from the contribution to be made by these strong women.