Senior female staff members at the UWI’s Mona campus, who appear to have played second fiddle to their male counterparts over the years, may soon get a chance to compete on a level playing field, thanks to the recommendations of a special task force which looked at gender bias in the university’s hiring and selection processes.

The five-member task force found that female employees tend to passively accept subordinate roles, a problem that has remained unchanged throughout the 57 year-old institution’s history.

It has recommended that as of this academic year, administrators should put mentoring structures in place, particularly for women, and they also want greater transparency in the recruitment process as well as a detailed survey to examine the problem further.

Faculty and staff members have, for years, expressed dissatisfaction that senior heads of department have tended, largely, to male. In 2003, Mona’s Academic Board appointed the Strategic Challenges Task Force to look at the challenges confronting the institution and recommend appropriate responses.

Their findings, submitted last November and documented in the UWI’s January 2005 publication Strategic Repositioning, An Agenda for Action, are that males occupy most of the senior positions.

For example, both the institution’s principal and deputy principal are male. The deans in all four faculties are male. Similarly, in the Medical Sciences Faculty, all four deputy deans are male.

In Pure and Applied Sciences, three of the four deputy deans are male and in Social Sciences the deputy dean is male. In Humanities and Education, there are two male deputy deans, despite a higher ratio of female full-time employees.

The report states that generally, males tend to predominate at the levels of professor, senior lecturer and lecturer but there is a greater proportion of females at the levels of assistant lecturer and teaching assistant.

Membership on key academic and finance committees, such as the Campus Council, Academic Board and Finance and General Purposes Committee has always been predominantly male.

The task force suggested that one of the reasons for the present gender ratio in its staff was female staff members’ failure to assert themselves, a trait found in the wider society.

“Women’s socialisation towards accepting certain traits and imposing limitations on themselves leads to passive acceptance of their subordinate position in the workforce and corporate hierarchy,” the report stated.

It also suggested that with its traditional recruitment system of promotion up the ranks, UWI Mona’s male/female distribution in senior academic positions for 2002/2003 would not differ too greatly from 1992/93.

The task force’s primary recommendation was that a further detailed survey of the issue needed to be done to “ascertain whether there is a historical bias towards hiring men (even when equally qualified women apply) or a historic absence of applications from women”. The task force has recommended that “remedial steps” be taken after the survey is completed.

It also found that another source of staff dissatisfaction was the failure to advertise all positions that become vacant, and there was also concern that the appointment and selection procedures for heads and acting heads were not always transparent.

Meanwhile, in contrast to its staff ratios, the UWI student population since 1980 has remained largely female.

In 2002/03, the ratio of female to male enrolment in undergraduate programmes was 73:27 and 68:32 for graduate school. Females dominate in the Faculty of Humanities and Education in keeping with expected gender patterns. There is also a preponderance of females in the Faculties of Law and Social Sciences.

The faculty which showed the closest male to female enrolment ratio is the Faculty of Medical Sciences and Pure and Applied Sciences. However, guild presidents throughout the years have nearly always been male.