Female academics are given a raw deal within higher education in both the United Kingdom and Germany, according to research by a University female academic.

Professor Rosalind Pritchard said that in the UK almost half of the female academics in pre-1992 universities are on the most junior lecturer grade and only 14% of professors are women.

She added: “The proportion of female professorships varies according to institutions: thus, only 6% of professors at the highly prestigious University of Cambridge are women. Some, especially in ‘new’ (post-1992) institutions receive the title of professor without the remuneration.

“According to the British Association of University Teachers (AUT, subsequently UCU), men are 1.5 times more likely to be awarded discretionary pay, and the average female academic will earn 4-5 years less salary than the average male colleague for the same number of hours worked. This is largely because women are at lower grades and a disproportionate number are in untenured or part-time positions and are located in post-1992 (‘new’) universities.”

Professor Pritchard, who is Head of the School of Education, is undertaking the research under a Leverhulme Research Fellowship.

She revealed that in Germany, the proportions of women in the highest professorial grades have been rising continuously since 1990, and doubled between 1993 and 2004. However, a notional target of 20% female professors, and 40% female management by 2002 had still not been reached in 2006. The proportion of women in leading positions within the free-standing research institutes was only 7.7% in 2004.

Despite the fact that in Germany, 53.5% of female school leavers are qualified to enter higher education, the percentage of female university students was under 50% in 2002. In fact, the proportion of female university graduates is about 10 percentage points higher in the UK than in Germany.

Although female students currently constitute a high proportion of the student population in both countries, the top management positions are not feminised. Female students are clustered in a small number of fields, and numbers in the hard sciences are small.

Professor Pritchard said: “It is likely that future academics will come from the cohort of doctoral graduates, and the UK has more female PhD students and PhD holders in the so-called STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) than Germany. These figures are broadly in keeping with European trends where female students are clustered in a small number of academic fields and disciplines, particularly in the humanities and social sciences.

“The pursuit of an academic career is demanding and all-absorbing to the point that in Germany, as in the UK, many women are without partners and children. But few of their male counterparts are childless, so academic women do not pass on their genes whereas men do.

“Accompanying these statistics is a syndrome of female underachievement. Men are twice as likely to be entered in the UK Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) as women, and of the 43,000 academics recorded as ‘research active’ in the 2001 RAE, only 25% were women. Female academics in the UK submit fewer research grant applications and British academic women are not as productive as men: fewer of them had PhDs, and fewer published.”

Her research aims to investigate the reasons for gender inequality in British and German higher education; to examine and evaluate equality legislation in action; to tease out the social and epistemological aspects of gendered behaviour within the work situation of female academics; and to find out why female academics have a more difficult time gaining promotion in German than in British universities.

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