Madam, - Women academics in Ireland are heavily concentrated in the arts, humanities and social sciences. Significant numbers are working at senior level and women are world leaders in several areas.
Proof of this comes in the form of major international awards to projects led by women. To take but one small example: in the EU Marie Curie Transfer of Knowledge Research competition this year, the two projects from Ireland that were ranked in first and second place, not only in Ireland but in Europe (out of 329 applications across all disciplines) were led by women social scientists from Ireland.
Yet there is a major conference being held this week on the place of the Humanities and Social Sciences in 21st-Century Ireland in which only two of the 17 invited speakers are women.
The conference is organised by the Irish Universities Association in association with the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences. The only woman chairing an event is the secretary general of the Department of Education; the other chairpersons are all men. While it is welcome to see the arts, humanities and social sciences receiving the attention they deserve, the failure to have a gender balance at such a conference is living proof of gender blindness in higher education.
The relative absence of women matters not only symbolically but also because it results in a significant intellectual omission in terms of agenda-setting at the conference. For a host of reasons, as is well known internationally, women academics often have different research priorities to men.
The low profile of women at this conference indicates how far Ireland has to go to recognise excellence when it comes from women.
It also raises other profound questions about the importance of recognising diversity (and not just in terms of gender) in relation to agenda-setting at the national research table. - Yours, etc,
KATHLEEN LYNCH, Visiting Research Fellow, University of Cambridge; UCD Professor of Equality Studies, Cambridge, England.