so founded, and twice awarded,
an annual fellowship for a woman who has already published a
distinguished contribution to learning. But much more is needed in
this direction if women are to have the same chances as men to qualify
themselves for the higher university appointments. At almost all the
new Universities men and women are nominally alike eligible for every
teaching post. In practice, women are rarely if ever selected for the
higher positions. Sex prejudice undoubtedly counts for something in
this result. It may be assumed that, with two candidates of equal
merit, preference will certainly be given to the man: indeed, it is
certain that a woman must be exceptionally qualified and far more
distinguished than her male competitors to stand a chance of a
professorial appointment even in the most liberal of co-education
universities--Manchester, for example, where the conditions are
exceptionally good. This fact should not deter _fully qualified_ women
from applying for professorial chairs. The power of suggestion is
very great, and it is well to accustom appointment committees to the
consideration of women's claims: in time it may appear less strange to
choose a strong woman candidate than to reject her in favour of a less
qualified male applicant.

It must be confessed, however, that the case does not at present often
arise. The girl who has had a brilliant undergraduate career, and who
has real capacity for advanced study, exists in her hundreds. But in
almost every case when she is not financially independent, at best
after an interval of preparation for her M.A., she accepts a junior
lectureship or demonstratorship, and from that time onwards is
swallowed up in the vortex of teaching and routine work. Often she
makes heroic efforts and succeeds in producing independent results,
but, so far, to nothing like the extent that would be commensurate
with the promise of her undergraduate achievement. Generally she
is too conscientious about detail, too interested in her students
individually and collectively, to secure sufficient time for her own
studies.

If a lecturer be known to teach between twenty and thirty hours a
week, it is tolerably, though not entirely, safe to assume that it is
a woman who is so foolish. In so doing, she is destroying her chances
of advancement--intellectual and professional--and is laying her whole
sex open to the charge of being unsuited to university work except in
its lower branches