The university registrar carefully read down the list of 17 promoted candidates, then looked up with a start and answered: “One.”
Just one woman had been promoted to senior lecturer, though more than half of the junior lecturers were female. I was furious. I felt my grandmother, Hanna Sheehy Skeffington, there beside me. She’d been imprisoned for smashing windows at Dublin Castle for women’s suffrage; how could I now not also take up the fight for equality?
It was no longer just about me, though I had spent 19 years as a junior lecturer and been refused promotion four times; it was now clear the university system was at fault. So, though no one had ever succeeded with such a case in academia in Ireland or Britain, I lodged a gender discrimination case with the Equality Tribunal.
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