Firsts, numbers and trends : gender at the University of Malta

Abstract

During this year, 2019, the University of Malta (UM) will deservedly take some time to look back with pride and celebrate its two hundred and fiftieth anniversary as a state university. It became the ‘University of Malta’ in November 1769, after Grandmaster Pinto expelled the Jesuits who had been running the Collegium Melitense, the antecedent to the university, since 1592, and rechristened the university as a public institution. But this year UM is also acknowledging the hundredth anniversary from the enrolment of its first two female undergraduate students: Tessie Camilleri and Blanche Huber entered the University together in October 1919, the first choosing the Humanities and the other Medicine. This article takes the second commemoration as an excuse to reflect critically on the role of gender at the University of Malta (UM). It examines the stubborn progressive reduction of females from the highest academic ranks of the university, and tries to establish the main reasons for such a condition.