"The promotion of gender equality is something which matters very much to me, and I’ve been shocked in my own profession by the extent to which the seeming gains of the women’s movement in the 1970s turned into the merest kind of tokenism in the professions.
Everything remains harder for women, at every stage, and it remains to my mind quite a scandal that at Cambridge when I last counted, there were 54 members of the Faculty of History and only 16 were women. I remember mentioning this in my farewell speech to the Faculty, and Melissa Lane said to me afterwards, “Are you sure it’s only 16? It feels much more.” I said to her, “That’s only because the women are amazing!” Of course it feels more because they have to be that much cleverer, more prominent, more committed, more everything. But 16 out of 54 is really unjust. I feel strongly that we’ve got to keep pushing on these doors that are not open in the way that they should be."--Quentin Skinner. (Thank you Petra Van Brabandt for the pointer.)
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