Aisling Dolan (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

The Athena SWAN charter is one thing but it is not enough. We need to ensure that women come through. Although there is 26% of professorships, only 30% of applications came from women. In other words, we need to ensure there is funding available for starting investigators, PhDs, post doctorates and increasing funding at IRC and SFI level. We need to make sure that the centres of excellence being funded bring through women principal investigators, PIs, as well and not solely excellence. We know excellence exists. Look, for example, at the Vice-Chancellor of Oxford University, Professor Louise Richardson. She is in the top five in the world. Is the Minister of State saying that we cannot have the same number of professorships in Ireland? I do not think so. The excellence is there and we need to support it.

We need to make sure there is a targeted plan of teaching buy out to allow women to focus on research. We need to make sure we support them in terms their peer review publications, their h-index and their participation in EU funding programmes such as Horizon 2020. To become a professor, one needs to ensure one can drawdown on Exchequer and non-Exchequer funding. We need to make sure that we support those women to achieve that target. Science Foundation Ireland recently stated in its statement of strategy that 35% of its award holders would be female. That is a target we need to achieve.