I move:
That Seanad Éireann takes note of the Joint Committee on Women's Rights Interim Report: Education.
This committee, one of the committees recently established by the Houses of the Oireachtas, first met in September 1983. After a few meetings in which it discussed how it should go about its business it established education as a priority subject. Accordingly, from January to May of this year the committee at its fortnightly meetings was completely engaged on the question of studying the influence of our educational system on the role of women in our society.
During those meetings the committee received oral submissions from a relatively large number of groups who had many things of relevance and interest to say to the committee. I would like to say as a member of that committee how much we benefited from this process of the attendance of interested groups and individuals and how much this contributed to our report. Those who did come before the committee are listed on page 38 of the report. They included Sylvia Meehan, Chairperson of the Employment Equality Agency, and the then secretary, now former secretary, of the Department of Education, Liam Ó Laidhin. We had a group representing the Council for the Status of Women; we had representatives of the AIM Group.
There were oral submissions from the Conference of Major Religious Superiors (Ireland), from the Association of Secondary Teachers Ireland, the Irish Federation of University Teachers, the Irish National Teachers' Organisation and from the Teachers Union of Ireland. Apart from these major submissions in which the written submissions were supplemented by oral submissions and by question and answer sessions, the details of which can be read in the published proceedings of the committee, there were also a number of other written submissions which were of help to us. The committee engaged a research officer, Ms. Eunice McCarthy of the Department of Psychology in UCD, who provided us with many valuable studies. We have in the report which was adopted and tabled last October the fruits of all that work.
The first point I would like to turn to is the question of why this Joint Committee to deal with Women's Rights should have taken education as the key priority item, as the question to be dealt with in its first report. This point is dealt with in our report and I would like to quote from the introduction on page 6 what the committee had to say. It states:
It was generally accepted by the members that many of the inequalities between the sexes, are rooted in the educational system as at present structured in this country. As a result, and contrary to the many laudable expressions in support of equality, the Irish social system still accords a very low priority to the rights of women in all spheres of activity.
That is the way the report opened. Again if we look towards the end of the report, if we look at page 36, there is a clear statement that we have a key problem and that if it is not solved then everything else will be frustrated. Page 36 of the report states:
...If women are to be guaranteed liberation and equality of opportunity this must be based on equal opportunities from the very start of their education. From generation to generation parents and teachers pass on unchanged attitudes to their children and pupils and this influence is significant, as boys and girls see around them the role they are expected to play in society. In recognising the need for change in Irish society the Joint Committee agrees that any fundamental change must be initiated through the educational system, so that it becomes one of equality in the fullest sense with pupils of both sexes receiving the same education in the class room and the same opportunities to use that education when they leave school.
This is a position to which everyone in Ireland has adhered in principle in recent years. As long ago as 1967 we supported and voted for in the United Nations the Declaration on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women. Article 9 of that UN declaration is worth putting on record in this debate. It states:
All appropriate measures shall be taken to ensure to girls and women, married or unmarried, equal rights with men in education at all levels and in particular.
(a) equal conditions of access to and study, in educational institutions of all types including universities, vocational, technical and professional schools;
(b) the same choice of curricula, the same examinations, teaching staff with qualifications of the same standard and school premises and equipment of the same quality whether it be institutional co-educational or not;
(c) equal opportunities to benefit from scholarships and other study grants;
(d) equal opportunities for access to programmes of continuing education including adult literacy programmes;
(e) access to educational information to help in ensuring the health and well-being of families.
Ireland voted for that UN declaration in 1967. What the Joint Committee were concerned with was examining how in the intervening years we have lived up to that declaration that we then adhered to.
In looking back and discussing this Declaration it is useful for us in this instance, as in almost every other instance, to look back to what was said in our own basic document, the Report of the Commission on the Status of Women established in 1970. This Commission submitted an interim report on equal pay in 1971 and its final report in December 1972. This report should be on the table for discussion as well as the report of our Joint Committee in a debate like this for two reasons. The first reason is that I want to take this opportunity, as I take every other opportunity, to pay tribute to the farsightedness of the members of that commission. They could have confined themselves to the immediate problem of equal pay which was the reason for their establishment. They did much more than that. I would like to pay tribute to them and particularly to the chairman of that Commission, Dr. Thekla Beere who, having through her own career made a breakthrough on behalf of women in the Civil Service that still stands alone, followed by chairing so successfully this commission. Secondly, when we come to study a question like the present one, we should note what changes have occurred and above all note how much mentioned in that basic document, how much of it still remains to be done.
It is very interesting to look at the Commission Report during this debate. Its first chapter deals with the Commission's establishment and the way they went about their work. The report starts to get down to business in chapter 2. It is very interesting, and largely coincidental, that just as the Joint Committee, coming together when established by this House and by Dáil Éireann, picked out education as a priority, education also is singled out at the start of chapter 2 by the Commission of 1970-72. They had the insight at that time to go to the heart of the matter. Chapter 2, paragraph 21 of the Commission report states:
In the remaining Chapters of this report we deal mainly with instances of actual discrimination against women and our recommendations are designed to remove such discriminations. However, the removal of these actual discriminations leaves untouched a larger and more subtle area of discrimination consisting of those factors which limit women's participation even in the absence of formal discrimination, that is, the stereotyped role that is assigned to women, the inculcation of attitudes in both boys and girls in their formative years that there are definite and separate roles for the sexes and that a woman's life pattern must be predominantly home-centred while the man's life pattern would be predominantly centred on employment. It is from this type of cultural mould that formal discrimination arises and it is only by the removal of such traditional attitudes that women can hope to achieve complete self-fulfilment and equal participation in all aspects of the life of the community.
We have no excuse for saying that this vital role of education, this problem of stereotyping, had not been clearly pointed out to us. It was clearly pointed out to us in the leading paragraph of the Report of the Commission on the Status of Women, reported to this House 12 years ago. With your permission, I will quote also from paragraph 22 of the Commission's report to the Minister for Finance, December 1972. It is Prl. 2760 and states:
Early sex-role development is affected mostly by the child's experience in its immediate surroundings of the home and, in Irish society the typical profile presented is that of the mother taking charge of the home with the father working outside it. These early attitudes to male and female roles may be reinforced by experience at school. By the time the average girl leaves school she sees her future life in terms of a relatively short period of gainful employment followed by marriage and responsibility for looking after the home and caring for children. This portrayal of her life-pattern is frequently reinforced and glamourised by newspapers, women's magazines and commercial advertising.
As I said, we have had this brought to our attention and it was indeed full time that we should, through the medium of the Joint Committee on Women's Rights, have taken up this question and examined what are the key points in this whole area of education.
Having decided on education as a general area, the Joint Committee identified four topics within that area as particularly worthy of attention. These were the questions of co-education, of the curriculum, of the training of teachers and promotion opportunities for women teachers. Of course there had not been any statutory or legal bar to the participation of girls or grown women in education in the sense mentioned by the UN declaration but once again we have no excuse for not realising that problems occur. A study by the International Labour Organisation going back as far as 1965, specifically mentions the situation of developed countries such as ourselves — and in the educational sense we are a developed country. I will quote from the report of a 1965 meeting of ILO Consultants on Women Workers' Problems:
The International Labour Organisation has noted that in the developed countries there are, in general, no wide gaps between the education of boys and girls but there are sometimes qualitative differences in the education given to girls, particularly at the secondary level where co-education is not always the common practice and where there is a tendency to involve girls less than boys in mathematical and scientific subjects and for girls themselves to avoid these subjects whenever there are elements of choice in the curricula.
The ILO report goes on to say that:
Equality of access to schooling does not, of course, exclude the possible qualitative differences...
In paragraph 519 in regard to the submissions made to them they say:
The tenor of these submissions has been that segregated education has a built-in tendency to be unequal education...
That has been our experience here. They continue:
...a greater degree of co-education would ensure for girls the same encouragement and opportunity as for boys.
This was the first topic within the area of education which was addressed by the report of the Joint Committee that we are considering this morning, and I would direct the attention of Senators to what is said on this matter on pages seven, eight and nine of the report.
The Joint Committee are quite careful to point out that they are conscious of the role of parents as the early and fundamental educators of the child and that consequently any substantial change in educational structures must respect the wishes of parents. But these parents are themselves the product of our educational system. These parents have been educated and formed by an educational system which has built-in disadvantages for girls of its very nature. So, part of the task which has to be done — by the Members of the Oireachtas who are interested in these problems, by the members of the public who are interested and by the Minister and her colleagues who are responsible in various parts of this area — includes the education of the existing parents. What has to be done has to be done with the consent of the parents and, therefore, the parents themselves have to be brought to realise what is the way forward towards a just system of education.
I do not wish to go into much detail about what is said in the report. Other Members may wish to go into other aspects, but I would point out what has been said on pages eight and nine. At this stage I would like to acknowledge what has been done in this area by the Minister. In paragraph 2.2 on page eight we mention that "The blatant sex stereotyping in school text books at all levels is a matter of serious concern".
Again I would like to hark back and pay tribute to the Commission on the Status of Women because they drew our attention in 1972 to this same problem and I would refer Members to what was said in paragraph 520 of the report of that commission. The problem was clearly outlined there. They talked of this problem that those of us who are interested know so well.
I want to pay tribute to the Department and to welcome the departmental guidelines for publishers which were issued in May of this year. In the guidelines, particularly in paragraph 3.4, the problem has been very well stated. Paragraph 3.4 deals with the question of roles. I would like to pay tribute to the Minister and her Department, not only for taking action in this regard, but for describing the problem so clearly. I would like to say — and I intend this as a compliment — that the manner in which these guidelines have been set out is sophisticated to a degree that one does not expect from the bureaucracy of large Departments. This is no normal bureaucratic circular. This circular is a model of what Government circulars should be. It clearly identifies the problems. It sets out at the beginning that "it is not the purpose of these notes to be regulatory, restrictive and censorious, but they are intended to be a guideline". So often that word "guideline" is used and the guideline is, in fact, in the nature of a ukase, that word so beloved of crossword compilers. This particular guideline not only meets a problem identified clearly by the Council for the Status of Women 12 years ago, and identified by anybody who has looked at the problem but, of course, is drawn attention to as still being a serious problem by the Joint Committee.
The other topic that the committee drew attention to is the question of the curriculum and the question of subject choice. Here again, the committee were greatly helped by the fact that they had available to them the Hannan Report, which is ESRI paper No. 113, published in May 1983. This research paper on "Schooling in sex roles, sex differences in subject provision, student choice in Irish post-primary schools", is a research effort for which we indeed should be grateful. One of the troubles is that it is so much of a research effort that it is somewhat difficult even for those used to reading such reports to go through and absorb. It is slow reading. It lies heavily on the mind at times.
We are very lucky that we have also the publication of the Employment Equality Agency which takes this report, summarises its findings and recommendations and gives its own commentary on it. There is no excuse for anybody not to be able to read this publication of the Employment Equality Agency which, in fact, does get over the message of the Hannan Report, without having to climb one's way through the academic scaffolding that was necessary in order to reach the conclusions that are in the report. I hope my colleague, Senator Michael D. Higgins, will not think that I am being impolite towards his particular discipline when I mention this. The publications have two quite separate functions. The Hannan Report stands on its own for what it is but, from the point of view of action, we are lucky that we also have the other document.
The conclusions of the Hannan Report are very interesting. Indeed the model that they use when they talk of the take-up of subjects in school is the result of a threefold process of the provision of subjects, the allocation of subjects and the choice of subjects. The report is very valuable in indicating that the problem of the take-up of subjects by girls is not a simple one, that there are these three elements in the Hannan model, and that the corrective action that has to be taken will be different in these three areas, and that it must be taken in all three areas. Otherwise we will not reach a final solution.
Before passing on from this point, I would like to mention what is said on page 37 of the Employment Equality Agency summary. In the conclusion on page 37 of this report it says:
The economic, social and cultural role of women in society has changed considerably in recent years.
The summary goes on to discuss what it considers to be these changes. In the second last paragraph it then goes on to say:
Elements of the educational system have changed also, but at a considerably slower pace. If the educational system is to prepare girls and boys equally for the rapidly changing employment circumstances and redress the persistent inequalities in terms of girls' career prospects, considerable change will have to occur in the near future.
There is no need to bring that to the attention of the Minister. It is obvious from the work that she has already done that she is endeavouring to step up this pace. It is for us, not only in the report of the Joint Committee, but also in this debate here, to support the Minister and to urge her towards even greater efforts.
In regard to what the Joint Committee itself had to say about curriculum choice, I would like to draw attention to what the committee says in paragraph 3.2. It says:
The Joint Committee is pleased to note that the Minister for Education, through her Inspectorate, is encouraging the managerial authorities in mixed schools to offer subjects equally to both sexes and in particular to give girls the opportunity of taking technical subjects.
Then the report goes on to say:
Encouragement in itself however may not be sufficient and the Joint Committee hopes that the Minister will be able to make the necessary resources available to bring equality of choice into the curriculum in those schools where it is at present not available and where girls are usually the losers.
Of course we are all aware of the difficulties that the Minister for Education has in regard to availability and distribution of resources. In that connection, there is one comment that I would like to make in this regard which relates to the work of the committee. I would like to pay tribute to those Members of the Opposition who were members of the Joint Committee on Women's Rights on the fact that they did not bring political considerations or the difficulties of the Government in finding resources into the discussions of that committee. I must pay that tribute here. It was very welcome and this is the spirit in which our Joint Committees should work. Then they can be really valuable. The Joint Committee on Women's Rights did show a great example there. I pay tribute to my colleagues from the Opposition for their attitude.
I want to make it clear to the Minister that what we are saying here, and we are all saying it together, is that as resources become available it is highly necessary that additional resources be very carefully steered to some of the areas in which a relatively small increase in staff or other resources could make a very real difference in overcoming the disadvantages in regard to girls in school and this general problem.
I would also like to draw attention to paragraphs 6.1 and 6.2 on page 16 of the report. In paragraph 6.1 we are talking about maximising the benefits to pupils where two or more post-primary schools exist. The Department have already taken a part in urging managerial authorities to assist in the amalgamation of these schools. This is something that we feel could make quite a real contribution. We go on to deal in paragraph 6.2 with the difficulties that girls still find in being able to take subjects such as physics and higher mathematics at leaving certificate standard. Here I think the question of the mobility of teachers among post-primary schools in an urban centre is something that we would like to see used much more widely.
In paragraph 6.2 the Joint Committee asks the parties concerned — the Department, the teachers, the management and the parents — to come together and devise some arrangements for the interchange of teachers pending the outright amalgamation of schools. I must say here that, when this point was discussed with the representatives of the teachers, the teachers' unions who appeared before the committee, they were receptive to this and they indicated that there would be no trade union difficulties. I would urge the Minister to take action for the longer term problem of amalgamation and for the interchange of teachers pending amalgamation.
Another topic that the Joint Committee adverted to specifically because of its importance was that of guidance counsellors. It is interesting that once again I can pay tribute to the Commission on the Status of Women because, even though they were only dealing with education to a minor extent because they were largely concerned with the problem of the formal discriminations, nevertheless in paragraph 5.23 of their report they did refer to this question under the term that was used at the time of career guidance. It is worth indicating what their opinion was, if only from the point of view that it is exactly reinforced by our committee working over 12 years later. I quote from paragraph 523 of the Commission's report:
A subject that has been brought to our attention many times as being of importance in relation to equality of educational and employment opportunity for girls is that of career guidance. Girls have in the past tended to study subjects and courses without any clearly defined career in view or else they have aimed at careers in already overcrowded occupations. Effective career guidance at an early stage in a girl's career could do a great deal to remedy this position and to encourage girls to adopt a less conservative attitude towards career patterns. It could also help to alter the educational consequences for girls of the sex-typing of many occupations by encouraging them to aim at careers which may in the past have been regarded as "men-only" preserves. Of course the career guidance offered to girls must be realistic and take account of their potential, trends in employment and the likelihood of access to the proposed employment. Career guidance also has an important part to play in influencing a girl to look ahead of the immediate pattern of her career on leaving fulltime education.
Again we must recognise the clarity of vision of that particular commission and ask ourselves how we have reacted to it. I must say that, until I became concerned in this committee, I had forgotten that they had said it. I am sure I am not the only one who has forgotten that that particular commission addressed itself so clearly to many of the problems that we in the Joint Committee are concerned with. Indeed I have taken a vow that I never start to study any topic in regard to women's rights again without taking up my precious copy of this out of print Commission report and seeing what the Commission had to say on it.
The Joint Committee also dealt with this problem in paragraphs 5.1, 5.2 and 5.3 of the Report. While, of course, we must acknowledge what is being done in this regard, and it is extremely welcome, there may be a degree of complacency creeping in. People may think that, once so many guidance counsellors have been appointed, this problem has been solved. The committee calls attention here to a number of important points.
The first point relates to how the guidance counsellors already appointed are being used. The committee is concerned that, in many cases, the work of the guidance counsellor is not integrated into the planning and the management of the school, that the guidance counsellor is regarded as somebody who is doing his or her own specialist thing. Here in paragraph 5.1 the Joint Committee says:
The guidance counsellor is unique in that he or she, of all teachers, should be in a position to bring some influence to bear in breaking the sex-related study and career choice.
The Joint Committee is of the opinion that the guidance counsellor may not be involved to a sufficient degree in policy making, time-tabling, planning etc. as seems to be the case at the present, and it agreed that counselling should commence in the schools at a much earlier stage, certainly no later than the first year in post-primary education.
Of course the committee are conscious that they are laying out something here that should be done and that, with all the willingness that the Minister may have, it is not possible to do everything at once. The Joint Committee asked that, in recommending an increase in the number of guidance counsellors employed in schools, priority should be given to the areas of the greatest need where there is a difficulty here in regard to either the provision of subjects or to the actual choice of subjects as recognised in the Hannan Report.
I am gratified, and I am sure the other members of the committee are, that this priority seems to be recognised by the Minister in paragraph 5.8 of the Programme for Action in Education 1984-87 which was published in January of this year. We, in our report here, have given some advice which we hope will be acceptable to the Minister in regard to what some of these priorities should be.
There is another subject which is related to the question of the curriculum. We await with interest what the new Curriculum and Examinations Board will have to say. The committee did feel it necessary to stress the importance of a programme for living skills. The committee were struck by the fact that most groups who made submissions to them, emphasised the need to introduce a programme for living skills in the school curricula. Such a course is vital, not for any immediate advantage in the secondary school, but it is something the benefits of which would be reaped during adult life, particularly afterwards on the occasion of marriage and the foundation of a family. This is something that modern living conditions certainly do require. Equally, the modern living conditions which create problems in schools also require some new departures in regard to the training of teachers. Teachers have always been trained in the psychology of education. Nowadays a teacher almost requires to be a clinical psychologist. So serious are the pressures of modern society impinging on young people, the problems of drug taking, the problems of environmental conditions, the problems of lack of parental control and the problems of early expressions of sexuality. All of these now seem to be coming into the compass of the role of the teacher beyond this role of the teacher at the blackboard. I am not asking that teachers should do more in this respect but rather I think the position now is that teachers wanting to do something in this regard find themselves in a sense helpless, in that they are being exposed to these particular problems of guidance, particularly where pupils who are not finding a response in the home environment look to a response from the teacher.
We have seen, in the past year, tragedies arising from teenage pregnancy and from community attitudes towards it. We welcome the fact that moves are now being taken in regard to the gradual introduction in a responsible manner of sex education in schools in the context, which was made quite clear by the Minister and was made quite clear in a broadcast question and answer session by the Taoiseach, that what we are concerned with here is education in the area of responsible personal relationships. This, indeed, is something to be welcomed.
I have spoken at some length on the question of curriculum choice because it has many facets. There are other problems also. The joint committee did not neglect and, indeed, the community should not neglect, the problems which occur after leaving school. I want to talk about two of these only. I want to talk first about the problem of training and apprenticeship for girls. Despite the removal of some barriers in this regard, there is still a discouragement for girls in regard to the question of apprenticeship. The committee did receive a special report by Eunice McCarthy and Maeve Casey from the Department of Psychology at UCD which was most revealing in this regard. In regard to apprenticeship for the three years 1982 to 1984, only 3.8 per cent of the applicants for apprenticeships were girls. This really is a deplorably low figure. If we take what happens to those applicants, there are figures available for the year 1983 where the number of girls applying was unusually low. Of the number of applicants, 2.9 per cent were girls. The process was that, following application, they were technically assessed for their suitability and then they were subjected to interview before being accepted. It is clear that the girls who did apply were not only as suitable technically as the boys, but more suitable, because although only 2.9 per cent of the applicants were girls, 3.7 per cent of those technically acceptable were girls. What happens after is the interview when stereotyping on the other side of the interview table takes its toll. Only 1.0 per cent of those recruited were girls. We had a drop of almost four times based on impressions at interview.
Here is a problem which must indeed be solved. We have the case of girls who have overcome all the inhibitions about applying, girls who have proved to be technically capable of benefiting from this particular sort of training, being rejected at interview. We get the old stereotype attitudes coming in, in order to refuse them a chance. There is a huge task to be done here in regard to the question of ensuring that our social attitudes are changed.
There is another point in regard to the education of adult women that I want to advert to here. The question of adult education is dealt with in the report of the Joint Committee in paragraphs 9.1 to 9.8 and indeed the committee received a special report on the provision of day time adult education. I want to say here that one of the most interesting developments in adult education over the past few years has been the development of second chance education both within the VEC system and as a result of independent community activity. In particular one cannot read about the community based activity of day time adult education for women that is taking place today without a degree of excitement about this development. There are examples here of what can be done in Coolock, in Finglas, in North East Dublin and in Leixlip. What has happened here is something quite remarkable. There has been a tapping of enthusiasm, a tapping of a desire for knowledge, a desire for self expression. Anyone who has heard, on some radio programmes, of the results of this cannot but be enthusiastic. This is something very different from the old adult education for leisure activities. This is something socially very much more important. In many instances it is the question of second chance education, the question of women seeking to make up for a secondary education which they never had, which enables them not to found a career on a leaving certificate but enables them by developing this formal knowledge to allow themselves to understand better the complex modern world about us. Also, in many cases these community based efforts of adult education have resulted in courses in creative writing and in self expression. This, too, is a remarkable development.
Only two days ago I happened to be listening to the "Women Today" programme on the radio. They were dealing with this topic. There have been previous programmes which have dealt with it also. Some of the women who were concerned in one of these creative writing programmes read extracts from their work. Listening to this is one of the few instances in recent months where I had an experience which gave me real hope for the future of our society. This is a direction of hope. Women who have not had an opportunity of being educated to their full potential, whose self expression has been cramped as a result of this, suddenly have a chance to change this by a few people starting and others coming together. We are talking now of courses like those the Minister has to worry about. Are there going to be ten people in this course? Can it be put off? We are talking — in these centres and in these communities — of over 100 women coming together in these activities. I am almost afraid to ask the Minister to foster it, because the hand of the Department might kill this wonderful enthusiasm. But there are ways in which the Minister can help.
There is one minor difficulty for those who are trying to have their second chance at secondary education. Because of the way they are studying, because of the way in which their lives are organised, it is not possible for them to do more than one or two subjects. The only way they can test themselves is by sitting for the State examinations. Yet I understand the position is that in order to do so they have to pay the same fee as somebody who is taking six, seven or eight subjects. I would be glad to know whether it would be possible to introduce a fee per subject basis to avoid this situation. The paying of a fee of £30 may appear minor but to a wife who is making this effort, possibly with the disapproval of her husband, this could be a real hindrance. We must acknowledge what these women are doing, the spirit they are showing.
There is a considerable problem in regard to creche facilities. Here the women are showing remarkable enterprise in this regard. They are organising this themselves. They are indulging in the usual activities for raising funds. I know that to provide full facilities might be difficult. But if the Minister could use her good offices in regard to the question of where there is even vacant space available for the accommodation of creches this would be a contribution.
It is obvious from what I have said that I believe this particular topic is worth a report on its own and worth a debate on its own. I mention it here as a topic of particular importance.
I move now to the question of teacher training. It is quite obvious that the role of the teacher in eliminating sex stereotyping in schools is a vital one. From the evidence we heard at the Joint Committee it is quite clear that a number of individuals in training colleges and in the Department of Education do advert to the need to take this factor into account in the training programmes. It is a factor that is adverted to and discussed in their particular course work but there is a need that this element should be more widespread in the training of teachers and possibly on a more formal basis.
The final point I wish to deal with is the question of promotion of women teachers. This is dealt with in paragraphs 10.1 to 10.6. It may be sufficient merely to record what the situation is. The situation in primary schools is as follows: 75 per cent of the teachers are females; 47 per cent of the principals are females. You could put that the other way and say 25 per cent of the teachers are male but they hold 53 per cent of the principalships. There are historical factors here. The marriage bar in the past, which is not gone all that long, must have some influence. We have now removed this marriage bar, but we must take affirmative action to redress the imbalances that remain. When we look at the community schools, which show such a good approach to co-education in other respects, we find that the women are almost half of the teaching force — 46 per cent. How do they fare out as principals? Five per cent. Here, surely, is an imbalance not completely explained by the subjects which were taught in the schools, that were the foundation of the schools, Here there must be a very real problem in regard to interview boards, in regard to the membership of interview boards, in regard to questions and in regard to the evaluation. I am glad to note that the Minister has, in recent weeks, revised the regulations for interview boards. This is something to be welcomed. I think the committee will thank the Minister for this. But this is not the end of the problem. Ensuring that there will be one woman, and with due regard for equality at least one man, on each interview board will ensure that the occurrence of undue questioning will not go unnoticed. But we still have the problem of the evaluation of the answers.
We have only to look to Northern Ireland to see how subtle is the way in which discrimination can be practised on interview boards. I came to know of a case recently, of an interview board for the Civil Service in Northern Ireland under direct rule. It has been a very long time since anybody was asked at an interview board in Northern Ireland: "What is your religion?" It was never necessary to do this because with segregated education all you were ever asked was what school you went to. When you answered what school you went to this revealed the answer that was being sought.
I had thought that this was now gone. But I was rather interested to hear that in this recent interview for the Civil Service in Northern Ireland under direct rule the first question which was asked of an applicant, whose name did not reveal his religion, was: "Do you play soccer or do you play Gaelic football?" He was able to give the truthful and unhelpful answer that be played neither and was a member of a rugby club, thereby adding to the difficulty of the interview board.
But where people wish or tend to discriminate they cannot be stopped. They cannot be stopped by composition of interview board unless one can weed out all these people, nor by a list of prohibited questions. The board in the case mentioned were not a bit interested in his playing rugby. The next question was: "It has often been suggested that Ireland would do better in international soccer if Ireland had one team drawn from the North and the South. What do you think of this suggestion?" The questions were all about sport, of course. This is a typical subject at an interview in order to explore people's personality and their attitudes. Here is an instance of how such a topic can be abused. What the Minister has done in regard to interview boards is a first step. A lot more steps will have to be taken, more in terms of education. It is difficult to say what the time scale is going to be for the solution of this problem.
In conclusion I would like to point out what has been said in the conclusion to the report. In the conclusion, on pages 35 to 37, I find of particular importance the first paragraph on page 35:
While accepting that there is now a greater awareness among the general public of discrimination against women in all walks of life, insufficient affirmative action is being taken to eliminate the problem. A restructuring of the existing educational system, backed up with a positive commitment by the Government, and spearheaded by the Department of Education, to eradicate all elements of sexism in the area of education is seen as a necessary first step to bring about a society where equality for all the citizens will no longer be an unfulfilled dream but a reality. Changes in the educational system will not be effected overnight, and changes will come only through the wholehearted efforts of the Department, teachers, management and parents, each group working in close co-operation with the other. Attitudes long held must change if society is to appreciate the benefits, educationally and socially, that will inevitably ensue from an educational system free from every form of discrimination.
The Minister is being asked to spearhead this particular attempt to create, in this respect, a new social order. It is up to all of us to support her. It is a work which must be tackled with increased determination and vigour. But it will be a long haul, and in starting it we should realise that.
In the last paragraph of our report we said:
The Joint Committee on Women's Rights emphasises its convictions that co-education is the vehicle by which this situation will be brought about and that the advantages deriving from co-education will eventually be reflected in all areas of society. It is further convinced that the implementation of all the proposals it has made throughout this report is vital for the education and training of our young people if they are to take their places as equal partners in the modern world. Accordingly the Joint Committee exhorts the Government and in particular the Minister for Education to accept and implement the recommendations of this first interim report.
I echo that request. From what I know of the Minister and from what I have seen of what she has done since taking office, I do not think we will be asking in vain.