Gender pay gap: universities are doing better than the BBC (but there is work to do)

"there’s more than one example of institutions taking positive steps to encourage female academic staff to apply for promotion". Some universities are boasting now about the high success rates when women apply for promotion. Ironically, what they leave out of the story is that there is an extra hurdle in that applications require prior approval before they can be submitted. This means of course that it is even harder for women to get promoted because only applications that are guaranteed to be successful will be approved. If not, the university's equality claims will fall apart (unless they are forced to publish how many applications are rejected at the pre-application approval stage).

Hi. I agree. I think my point was the whole thing, rather than just the first half - that there are examples of Universities taking positive steps to encourage women to apply and then finding that those applications have a negative impact on their gender pay 'gap' data. I totally agree that there are issues with the encouragement of applications in the first place, similar to the issue of not being encouraged perhaps to apply for grant funding.