Survey 2001: Men who never married, never had a child, worked full time and were college educated earn only 85% of what women with the same criteria earn.

Men have dominated our boardrooms, men have dominated academia. Here in my university, the proportion of women academics, that’s just about 30 per cent. And as you can imagine, the higher you go up the ranks, the fewer women that you find. But, I must say, that it’s a good time at my university, I am the first female vice-chancellor. For the first time too, we have a female chancellor, we also have a female council chair for the first time. It is a source of encouragement to many females out there, but also for males – they dream for themselves, they dream for their wives, their daughters, their sisters.

I don’t believe that you would find any institution in the world where concurrently, the Vice-Chancellor, the Registrar, the Chancellor, the Chair of Counsel, the Chief Academic Officer and the Legal Counsel are all female.

In the last century, of the women whose achievements endure for us in one way or another, nearly all never married (Jane Austen, Emily Brontë, Christina Rossetti, Emily Dickinson, Louisa May Alcott, Sarah Orne Jewett) or married late in their thirties (George Eliot, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Charlotte Brontë, Olive Schreiner). I can think of only four (George Sand, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Helen Hunt Jackson, and Elizabeth Gaskell) who married and had children as young women. All had servants.

Following parliamentary debate, the university was granted a charter to admit 85% women and 15% men. While this wasn’t our original vision, we were pleased with the female-focused ratio.

Very unfortunately, she had no husband. She had never had a husband, and therefore did not kill a husband.

The percentage of female computer- and information-science majors peaked in 1984, at about 37 percent. It has declined, more or less steadily, ever since. Today it stands at 18 percent.

A part-time working woman makes $1.10 for every dollar made by her male counterpart.

In my year at Manchester about 10% of the class were women. Many had been discouraged from applying to do law.

In our century, until very recently, it has not been so different. Most did not marry (Selma Lagerlof, Willa Cather, Ellen Glasgow, Gertrude Stein, Gabriela Mistral, Elizabeth Madox Roberts, Charlotte Mew, Eudora Welty, Marianne Moore) or, if married, have been childless (Edith Wharton, Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, Dorothy Richardson, H.H. Richardson, Elizabeth Bowen, Isak Dinesen, Katherine Anne Porter, Lillian Hellman, Dorothy Parker). Colette had one child (when she was forty). If I include Sigrid Undset, Kay Boyle, Pearl Buck, Dorothy Canfield Fisher, that will make a small group who had more than one child. All had household help or other special circumstances.

There are only 40 women vice-chancellors heading up the roughly 1,500 universities across Africa.

When you come up to postgraduate level, you do get that the numbers percentage of female to male students become smaller. By the time you come to PhD level, that percentage reduces. It’s almost like looking at a pipeline and that pipeline leaks as you go along before you reach the end of the pipe itself.

There is solid evidence for the fact that when women speak more than 30 percent of the time, men perceive them as dominating the conversation; well, similarly, if, say, two women in a row get one of the big annual literary awards, masculine voices start talking about feminist cabals, political correctness, and the decline of fairness in judging. The 30 percent rule is really powerful. If more than one woman out of four or five won the Pulitzer, the PEN/Faulkner, the Booker — if more than one woman in ten were to win the Nobel literature prize — the ensuing masculine furore would devalue and might destroy the prize. Apparently, literary guys can only compete with each other. Put on a genuinely equal competitive footing with women, they get hysterical.

The same professors who talked about literature as an absolute value never talked about the sexist messages we were getting from it. The rules of conduct of that time, in the 1950s, were completely different for women, on campus, from what boys were permitted to do. There was a peculiar kind of tacit agreement to pretend that the absolute values were classless and sexless, even though they aren't.