ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on some potential barriers to women’s likely success in the academic, research community. It identifies various issues and themes that may have a detrimental effect on women’s ability, or inclination, to compete with men for these important research rewards. The chapter considers how women’s lack of seniority and their different roles from their male colleaguess contribute to their lack of success. Women have particular difficulty in securing access to this ‘colleague system’ that allocates resources, research support, and opportunities to publish. Barbara Bagilhole found that nearly a half of the women in her study were less successful than their male colleagues in obtaining external funding. Women academics are disproportionately distributed in new universities and thus disproportionately affected by the pattern of research grant allocation by Research Councils. C. Cockburn insightfully articulated the issue of women’s lack of representation on political decision making bodies: ‘Women’s relative absence deepens women’s silence, and so the cycle goes’.
