In my blog post for 22 January I mentioned that I am currently acting as a 'mentor' in the Senior Academic Women's Mentor Scheme currently being run by our department for Human Resources.  It is disappointing that we need such a scheme at all, but I am delighted to be part of it.  It is just over 50 years since the frist female professor was appointed in this university (Aileen Guilding in Biblical Studies in 1959).  A little later Alice Garnett (in my own department, Geography) became the second female professor and went on to become the first female Dean of a Faculty.  There have been relatively few since - among them Ankie Hoogvelt in Social Sciences, Pam Enderby in Medicine, Margaret Llewellyn in Law.   I would like to be corrected, but I don't think there was ever a female Dean in the Faculties of Engineering or of Pure Science: I'm not sure about Arts, but again I think not.

Micheline Beaulieu became the first female Pro-Vice-Chancellor, in 2005, and it was she who became the first woman ever to preside over degree ceremonies and confer degrees - 100 years after the University received its royal charter.  Micheline had been head of department (in Information Studies) and was very keen to help other women to advance to senior positions within the university. Today I believe we have a greater number of female heads of departments than we have ever had before - and across all Faculties (with the exception of Engineering where I don't think there has ever been a female head). Within the professional services, women have held a number of the top positions - as heads of Student Services, Accommodation and Campus Services, as Academic Secretary, as Director of Human Resources, and as Director of CiCS.

But is a matter of regret to me, and I know to many others too, that our current University Executive Board has no women from an academic background as members, and we currently have no female PVCs.  We are unusual in this respect.  When I go to meetings of the Russell Group Pro-Vice-Chancellors for Learning and Teaching (as I shall next week) I am within a group that is half male and half female.  Until recently both the PVC for research and the PVC for learning and teaching at Leeds were women - one from French and one from English.  I have close research connections in both Portugal and France, and when I attend senior meetings at the University of Lisbon women are often in the majority - indeed my main contact there is a female Pro-Rector. I have sometimes been the only male in the room at meetings in the Sorbonne.

But the data that Human Resoucres produces after each promotions round demonstrate that when they come forward for promotion women have an equal chance of success to men.  However therein may lie an issue - is it that women are more hesitant about coming forward?   Are women acacdemics less willing to take a risk than men in aiming for top jobs?  I don't know the answers, but it is because I am keen to explore what can be done in this area that I have taken on three senior women as mentees for the whole of 2010 (in fact, three and a half since I am sharing one with another PVC).

I mention all this today because one of my mentees (I prefer to think of them as colleagues - partly because the original Mentor, to Telemachus in the Odyssey, was in my perception a very old and grizzled man) has been 'shadowing' me today to learn more of what I do; of how various University committees run; of what the corporate-level discussion points currently are - and to start the process of deciding what her longer-term ambitions might be.  Mentoring is actually a two way process, because I have learned a lot from her (as I also have from my other female colleagues in the scheme) through the questions she has asked and the observations she has made.