Women and academic workloads: career slow lane or Cul-de-Sac?

Career progression for women academics to higher levels is not in proportion to their representation within the profession. This paper looks at theories about this and relates them to current practices within universities for allocating work. The management of workloads can disadvantage women through a number of interactive factors. Interruptions in continuity of employment and fractional contracts can work to exclude or hinder research activity, an area pivotal for higher progression. The issue that many models for allocating work exclude research from their calculations exacerbates this. Additionally this feeds off expectations that research work is conducted after hours at home, a feature that women may find more difficult. Lastly a lack of transparency can allow areas of, often unwitting, discrimination to go undetected through the skewed allocation of types of work not strongly associated with promotion. The paper suggests a series of measures that might improve this situation.     

ATTITUDES OF LITHUANIAN SERVICE PROVIDERS IN GERONTOLOGY EDUCATION PROGRAMS: A PRELIMINARY STUDY

Having regained independence from Russia in 1990, Lithuania is in the process of developing a social service system to meet the needs of its older citizens. This paper describes the current situation of older persons in Lithuania and the early stages of gerontology education and gerontological service provision in that nation. Future social service providers (n = 22) who participated in one of Lithuania's first gerontological education training programs completed the 17 items of Kogan's Attitudes Toward Old People Scale. Results indicate that future service providers hold generally neutral to positive attitudes toward older persons. The absence of negative attitudes toward older persons among the first generation of Lithuanian gerontological service providers bodes well for the development of gerontology education and services for older persons in Lithuania.     

Current Practice in the Allocation of Academic Workloads

Significant factors within UK higher education include explicit competition, regulatory demands and pressures to maintain student numbers despite tuition fee increases. Universities have responded by more actively managing finances and quality but seemingly not staff time. This paper sets out findings on the processes and practices surrounding academic workload allocation (WLA) in universities, based on 59 detailed interviews from a cross section of staff. The main findings from this research are that there are a huge variety of different practices surrounding WLA and much potential for improvement. The approaches observed can be seen to work in a continuum from informal to partial, to the more comprehensive. Although many felt the disciplinary context to be very important to the process chosen, the findings of the research reveal that this is not the case.