How linguistics helped me power up my language

Abstract

In 2019, female graduates by far outnumbered males. This was not the case when Prof. Lydia Sciriha (Department of English, University of Malta) started her own academic journey. Then, women made up under a third of undergraduates, and graduating female PhDs were counted in single digits. Four decades later, over half of new PhDs and lecturers are women, but their share shrinks as they move up the academic ladder. Even though female graduates outnumber males, men still dominate in decision-making roles. In her talk, Sciriha presented data over a span of forty years to show that Maltese women have now cracked the glass ceiling.