A few weeks ago, a woman from the Health Scotland Library contacted us to find out if we knew anything about the pioneering women professors in Scotland. After a brief discussion in the office, it transpired that no one knew for sure, although we all had our own guesses, which swung between naïve and cynical.
I had previously learned from Adele’s Lifelong Learning Pop Quiz that the first woman to graduate from Glasgow University was in the mid 19th century. I assumed that after waiting 400 years for admittance, it couldn’t have taken that much longer before women started teaching there. Maybe in the 1900s, 10s, 20s…? I was on the naïve side. Delphine Parrott – Glasgow’s first female professor – was appointed in 1973 in the Department of Bacteriology.
But Ms. Parrott was not the first woman in Scotland to reach the academic summit. In 1940, Margaret Fairlie was appointed Professor of Obstetrics and Gynaecology at the University of Dundee. (19 years earlier, Anne Louise McIlroy became the first female professor in the United Kingdom, in the equivalent department at the London School of Medicine for Women.)
If it seems surprising that it took Glasgow so long comparatively speaking, St. Andrews record of female appointments is positively shameful! Ursula Martin became Professor of Computer Science at St. Andrews in 1992, the first woman to hold that position since the university was founded in 1411.
I also asked the university archives if they had any information on the first BME women professors. Although everyone who replied to me was incredibly helpful (NB are all archivists at the Scottish Universities female? Or is it that only women are interested in women’s history?) no one seemed to have anything on BME women. The exception to the rule was my St. Andrews liaison, who noted sadly that the institution has yet to see a BME woman professor.
Marbai Ardesir Vakil studied her Post-Graduate degree at Queen Margaret College Medical School in 1893, a pioneering BME woman in Scotland. I am sure she would have been as shocked and disheartened as we are at the subsequent slowdown of female and BME academic progression in Scottish Universities since.
