New university post

The University of Otago is about to appoint its first gender equity leader.

Vice-chancellor Prof Sir David Skegg told the university council this week he intended to appoint a female senior academic staff member to the part-time role as soon as possible.

The person he had in mind was overseas and had not yet been approached.

She would be supported by a gender equity advisory committee and administrative staff, whose role it would be to monitor the number of women staff members and assist with gender equity initiatives.

The recommendations adopted by the council were put forward by a gender equity working party established last year by Prof Skegg and chaired by academic and international deputy vice-chancellor Prof Gareth Jones.

Its 12-page report outlined international, national and local gender equity findings and provided several pages of statistics on the number of women holding senior university academic positions.

There was very little information available on the number of women general staff in senior roles, but the working party had decided that Otago's focus should be on both academic and general staff, Prof Jones said.

The working party's report did not say whether Otago had too few women at senior level, or what the optimum number might be.

In 2007, 25 female academic staff members at Otago held roles at associate professor level or above, 14.3% of all staff at that level.

Among New Zealand's larger universities, Victoria University's tally was 24%, with 20.8% at the University of Auckland, 19% at Massey and 12.4% at Canterbury.

Comparable figures for selected universities overseas were: Melbourne 23.8%, Sydney 23.2%, Queensland 17.8% and University College London 20.4%.

Figures were available only for the number of women professors at United States universities.

Their tallies ranged from 13% to 19.2%.

Otago's general staff figures showed 23 women - 46% of total numbers in the category - were division directors, registrar or grade four and five staff.

As part of its consultation, the working party set up five staff focus groups.

The focus groups agreed university systems and policies did not obviously or intentionally disadvantage women, Prof Jones said.

But because staff were invited to apply for senior academic roles and women were less likely than men to recommend themselves for promotion, women could be disadvantaged.

Among other points raised by the focus groups were women being less likely to move elsewhere to advance their careers; women being more likely to combine family and work roles and not seek promotion because of workload pressures; women missing out on promotional opportunities because of taking time out to have children; and a lack of adequate child-care facilities.

allison.rudd@odt.co.nz