Dr. Arjumand Younus:

The Senator asked about gender equality initiatives in universities. I see a lot of training around bias, hiring committees and HR. As I said, however, there are not measures to build confidence in minorities and women that there should be. SFI has public engagement things but they should be more targeted to women, and ethnic minority women, so they know the options out there. Furthermore, I do not think that academic posts are enough. This is a problem around the world, not just Ireland. We need alternative career paths and academia should incorporate these in their training structures. For example, because I was in STEM, I had the option of moving to a research scientist role. In Ireland, industry does not have many of these roles and very few companies have it. For instance, I applied to Google. It was a software engineering role which I did not want; I wanted a research role. Even in the industry sector, we need to develop more of these roles in order that the PhDs can be integrated into the system. That could be something that IBEC, along with other employers and industry can think about.