Women are hugely under-represented in the senior ranks of most of the State’s colleges and universities, new figures show.
While just over half of all of lecturers in the seven universities are female, these numbers fall dramatically at higher grades such as associate professor (29 per cent) and professor (21 per cent). There has never been a female president since the establishment of the first Irish university about 425 years ago.
There is a similar gender gap in the 14 publicly-funded institutes of technology, though three of these institutes are headed by women.