women in academic positions in the universities in nigeria

higher education in the developing countries is a recent phenomenon.Generally, women are much stronger in the Humanities, Social Sciences,Education and Medicine (especially nursing) than in Engineering, Agriculture,Commerce and many of the sciences. Some examples of the position of womenin academic and other administrative positions in various countries of the worldare now presented.In Finland, the expansion of higher education system during the lastdecade especially favoured women to the extent that today they have alreadygained advantage over men. Stolte-Heiskanam (1993) noted that althoughwomen became eligible to be university teachers in Finland since 1916, by 1993only one women in Finland academic history had succeeded to reach the statusof a University Rector. She concluded that although the economic, social,political and educational participation of the Finnish woman is one of the highestin the western industrialised countries there is still room for improvement,especially in the scientific disciplines.Gendreau-Massaloux and Fave-Bonnet (1993) observed that in France,even though the number of teachers employed throughout the educationalsystem has increased, the position of women within the university has gainedlittle from these new waves of recruitment and that women, as the proportion ofthe total number of staff get increasingly smaller as one moves up theeducational hierarchy. In France there were only 3 women rectors (out of 32)and only 3 women University Presidents from 1985 till 1993. The situation inthe United Kingdom, Netherlands, Spain and Switzerland are sometimes evenworse than in France, with women being highly under-represented with regardto high level management positions in all cases. In the United Kingdom there