...female Vice-Chancellors out of 125 or so UK Universities that is.

My employer, Oxford Brookes University, has announced that its new Vice-Chancellor when Graham Upton retires at the end of the academic year, will be Professor Janet Beer, currently a Pro-VC at Manchester Metropolitan University. There are currently just sixteen female vice-chancellors in the UK.

About time too I say. In a bout of thinly disguised creeping to our new leader I think this is fantastic news. I can't remember the exact numbers but I am pretty sure we have had more female students than male for some years now (in the hall of residence I live in the balance two or three years ago last time I calculated was more like 60-40 female-male). We actually don't do as badly as some institutions in terms of women in "emerging" senior academic positions (though not nearly well enough), but our institutional heads have always been men.

Janet seems to have all the right credentials, though I am still a bit mystified as to why we all got the opportunity to grill candidates for Deputy Vice-Chancellors a few years back but "out of confidentiality concerns" we did not get the same opportunity with the new V-C. But it sounds to me as if the panel have made an excellent choice. Putting us a generation ahead of that "other" university down the hill I suspect (where they even still have different academic dress for women on the statutes).

Some day the glass ceiling will not just crack but will shatter into tiny pieces. With this appointment we will have an equal gender balance in the Senior Management Team itself I believe (though I'm forever losing count of who the various Pro V-Cs are!) But only two out of seven heads of non-academic directorates still and overall in the university whilst two thirds of all staff are women, only just over a third of senior management positions are filled with women.

So, whilst her gender is clearly not the only reason for appointing Janet, as her CV readily attests, it is a great move for the university and a step closer, I hope, to more widespread equality of opportunity for the majority of our students and staff.

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