Garrod was elected to the Disney Chair of Archaeology at Cambridge in 1939, making her the first woman to hold a professorial chair in the University, and before any woman was appointed as a professor at Oxford. In honour of her appointment, Newnham held a feast in her honour in which all dishes were named after archaeological items. However, during her initial years in the role, the power Garrod was able to exercise was limited. A ban on women becoming full University members meant that she was unable to vote on University matters, until the ban was lifted in 1948.
Economics has a woman problem. Women are under-represented at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. Following scandalous research that laid bare the “cesspool of misogyny” on the popular Economics Job Market Rumors website, the profession has done a fair amount of self-reflection about how it can be more welcoming to women. Economics attempts to explain how the world works, after all, so more diverse representation in the field is important to gain a more complete view of the economy.
"There is a double-take as you enter a room, as if you are not supposed to be there. You are noticed and it is uncomfortable. Like walking into a pub in a town where you don’t live. There is confusion, as you are not the natural expected occupant of that role. I know this well; in many meetings, even though I am a professor, I have been mistaken for the coffee lady. Even now, students do a double-take when they realise I am the expert professor taking the class."
Once factors such as postdoctoral experience and age are accounted for, the gap between the salaries of men and women is, on average, 6 percent, according to a survey conducted by the Statistical Research Center at the American Institute of Physics. Before accounting for such factors, the data showed that men in physics earned, on average, 18 percent more than women.
Data I’ve collected and worked with during my PhD shows that women are also less central in the social network of informal collaboration. This refers to the process among academics of providing feedback and helping other authors to improve their work through comments and engagements. Such networks enable the global flow of knowledge, which is crucial for research.