Academic marks equality battle’s 10th anniversary
Dr Micheline Sheehy Skeffington is marking the 10th anniversary of her landmark Equality Tribunal case against University of Galway with the launch of an audiobook documenting her campaign for gender equality.
After winning a gender discrimination case against NUIG in 2015, the granddaughter of Ireland’s leading suffragette, Hanna Sheehy Skeffington, donated her €70,000 award to five other women lecturers who were also unjustly passed over in the same promotion round.
The money funded their legal cases and kickstarted the ‘Micheline’s Three Conditions Campaign’ to support the five women and to highlight the situation for all women in Irish universities.
Publicity generated by the four-year campaign eventually led to the promotion of the women.
It also resulted in the Higher Education Authority setting up a taskforce, which recommended that government funding of all third-level institutions be contingent on achieving successive Athena SWAN awards, which required the implementation of higher minimum policy standards on gender equality.
“This was what the case and campaign were really about,” Dr Sheehy Skeffington said.
“For myself, and the other five women, it was never simply about our own situation but about highlighting academic promotion processes that were seriously faulty, at the expense of women,” she said.
The pioneering feminist, plant ecologist, and activist said the Micheline’s Three Conditions Campaign had led to radical improvement for women in third-level education.
“Previously Ireland ranked lower than every country in Europe, except Malta, for the Glass Ceiling Index, which measures the promotion of women to senior academic posts. The four-year campaign has now reversed that situation, which in turn is having repercussions throughout Irish society,” she said.
Improvements in Irish universities included more women professors, and first-time women presidents of Irish universities.
Some 20 Irish institutions now hold 136 Athena SWAN awards including 114 Bronze and 22 Silver. They were granted for policies such as family leave policies to provide support for foster care, surrogacy, fertility treatment and dealing with domestic violence; and a menopause support policy.
Dr Sheehy Skeffington worked with journalist Rose Foley, a key campaign member, to publish the story in a book. To mark the tenth anniversary, they have now created an audio version, which included interviews with key players.
■ The printed book is available in bookshops and online. The audiobook, just published, is available through all online audiobook sites.
Pictured: Dr Micheline Sheehy Skeffington with campaigners for gender equality at a demonstration at University of Galway (then NUI Galway) during a meeting of the university's academic council in 2015. Photo: Joe O'Shaughnessy.