The usual hand-wringing continues. Peter McGuire at the Irish Times [1] is all in a tizzy about gender imbalances at professor-level in our universities.
Apparently it’s all discrimination of one kind or another and has nothing to do with the choice many women make in the real world about how to properly balance home and work.
Sure, I too was taken aback when girls I met in university had told me their teachers had tried to redirect them from studying higher maths and physics. Some had to use physics labs in neighbouring boys’ schools. (Although I do suspect there was also a healthy level of public sector resistance to bother its behind to adapt curricula and provide new options to female pupils.)
But then what? Once traditionally male subjects are made available in the Leaving Cert, we’re still not there. We end up following Alice down the Rabbit Hole of tangential, postmodernist, convoluted logic, where “subconscious sexism” and the colour of pyjamas Granny bought you as a 3-year-old set you rigidly on a path to sexism-loaded academic choices.
Look, it’s really pretty simple. Life’s just not that conspiratorial. While it doesn’t exactly make for a huge sociological study, looking around you usually tells you a lot. What struck me as I raced headlong towards middle age is that more and more of my female contemporaries were choosing to put their careers on hold. Usually with Child #2, and certainly with Child #3, it seemed to be more than a budgetary decision; many report simply not wanting to leave the child in the care of another.
Ladies far smarter and more academically accomplished than I simply saw their role in raising their children as far more important and meaningful than going back to the office 50-60 hours a week. For shame! This, of course, is gender treason. How dare they forsake what the sisterhood has done for them! We can thank half a century of attacks on motherhood and child-rearing for that.
This, I argue, is one key reason for the disparity in male-female professorships. While the number of doctorates awarded per annum is more a factor of being intelligent enough and prepared to put in the time and effort, the number of permanent academic positions for these graduates is tiny. And what do these lucky few awarded departmental posts need to do to attain a professorship, in an environment where incumbents enjoy tenure? The awarding on a tiny number of positions is predicated on an intense dedication to the field and the politics of running the department. Given that such positions would be awarded well into one’s child-bearing/-rearing age, is it any wonder that there’s a tapering in female attainment?
Meanwhile, while some automatically look for sexism goes up because there are fewer women in the top levels of academia than men, those same people are none too worried when the claim is made that children don’t need the blend of a man and a woman when they are being raised.