Students believe statistics on gender demographics at University are “unsurprising”

A new demographic report by the University of Manchester has revealed just 27% of professors are female, despite the fact women are in the majority at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels.

The University of Manchester has said: “In the last five years there have consistently been more undergraduate female students than male students” – 55% of undergraduate students are women, rising to 63% of postgraduate students.

However, at each step towards academia the percentage of women decreases. 48% of all lecturers are women, yet this falls to 37% of senior lecturers. Within professors, the percentage of women drops by another ten percent to just 27%. This is higher than in previous years but still extremely low.

The University have responded to this saying: “A higher percentage of males that were eligible applied for promotions in the case of all core academic positions. A higher percentage of females were successful in applications for all core academic positions.”

A second year female Biological Sciences student responded to this imbalance saying, “It is upsetting to see statistics like this, especially with the under-representation of women in research in science at the university. It is quite demotivating.”

Female staff at the University of Manchester are also more often in professional support roles rather than academic. Whilst the overall staff numbers are more or less equal, with 50.5% of all staff being women, they only make up 42% of academic staff.

A first year History and Sociology student responding to the report said, “the women that are in those positions are likely to be white women, so it is an even smaller percentage of minority background women in positions of seniority.” The report did demonstrate this, as within white university staff, 51% are women, but amongst black members of staff, women are just 49%. This falls to just 46% of Asian staff being women.

This lack of representation is clear across the university, with very few buildings named after women, for example. The 15.1% gender pay gap is part of the four fights which the UCU are continuing to strike for.