Women Workers in Seven Professions: A Survey of Their Economic Conditions and Prospects
General
Women Workers in Seven Professions: A Survey of Their Economic Conditions and Prospects
Vocational guidance; Women -- Employment -- Great Britain
professorial appointment even in the most liberal of co-education
universities--Manchester, for example, where the conditions are
exceptionally good. This fact should not deter _fully qualified_ women
from applying for professorial chairs. The power of suggestion is
very great, and it is well to accustom appointment committees to the
consideration of women's claims: in time it may appear less strange to
choose a strong woman candidate than to reject her in favour of a less
qualified male applicant.
It must be confessed, however, that the case does not at present often
arise. The girl who has had a brilliant undergraduate career, and who
has real capacity for advanced study, exists in her hundreds. But in
almost every case when she is not financially independent, at best
after an interval of preparation for her M.A., she accepts a junior
lectureship or demonstratorship, and from that time onwards is
swallowed up in the vortex of teaching and routine work. Often she
makes heroic efforts and succeeds in producing independent results,
but, so far, to nothing like the extent that would be commensurate
with the promise of her undergraduate achievement. Generally she
is too conscientious about detail, too interested in her students
individually and collectively, to secure sufficient time for her own
studies.
If a lecturer be known to teach between twenty and thirty hours a
week, it is tolerably, though not entirely, safe to assume that it is
a woman who is so foolish. In so doing, she is destroying her chances
of advancement--intellectual and professional--and is laying her whole
sex open to the charge of being unsuited to university work except in
its lower branches.
It is certain that the number of University appointments open to women
is on the increase, and that there is no present likelihood that the
demand for qualified women will remain stationary. On the other hand,
the necessary qualifications, personal as well as intellectual, are
high; the work is hard, though attractive, and it is in every respect
undesirable that those whose talents can better be exerted in other
branches of the profession should endeavour to obtain College posts.
Roughly speaking such openings are of four kinds :--
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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