University of Limerick has welcomed the HEA Staff Gender Profiles Report published today calling on Irish third-level institutions to ensure more women are promoted to senior academic posts.
The University of Limerick has long led the way on bridging the gender gap in higher education in Ireland with consistently the highest percentage of women at professorial level of any Irish university. 31% of professors at UL are female which is 10% higher than the average of 21% across the Irish University sector.
UL was also announced as one of the first Irish institutions to achieve the Athena SWAN Bronze award in July 2015. UL and Trinity College Dublin are the only Irish higher education institutions to be granted the award on their first application submission. UL has since been awarded three additional departmental bronze awards endorsing the commitment to supporting gender equality and the progression of women in their careers at UL.
Gender equality is also a significant area of research at the University of Limerick. A research team at UL has previously called on Government to introduce legislation that would require employers to disclose the gender pay gap in their organisations. The UL research team, led by Dr Christine Cross, senior lecturer in personnel and employment relations at the university made the call at the Gender Equality in Decision-Making (GEM) conference hosted in Dell EMC’s Cherrywood Campus in Dublin (Thursday, September 22).
The call follows moves by the British Government to introduce legislation forcing employers with more than 250 employees to publish, on an annual basis, the difference between women’s and men’s earnings.