Malta places last among the EU countries regarding equal opportunities for promotion between men and women.

The detail emerges from a European Commission pre-print of the She Figures 2009, a useful source of data that reveals the relative progress in scientific research for men and women in the 27 member states of the European Union. The information is pooled from Eurostat and the national statistics offices all over Europe.

From 2002 to 2006, in the EU, there was an impressive increase of 4.4 per cent women researchers compared with 2.8 per cent for men and an increase of 73 per cent per annum new women PhD graduates compared with 3.8 per cent for men. However, the 2009 figures reveal that there are just 30 per cent women researchers in the EU, so that the rate of increase is not sufficient to correct the imbalance.

The concept of the glass ceiling is used as a metaphor to describe the seemingly invisible barriers hindering women from progressing to top positions. A persistent source of worry for the EU is the vertical segregation. A negligible number of women reach grade “A” level which Eurostat has defined as the level of full professor. For this reason, the European Commission has introduced the glass ceiling index (GCI), an indicator that measures the relative likelihood for women, compared to men, of reaching a top position. The GCI is defined as the ratio of the proportion of women reaching Grade A positions to the proportion of women in academia. Thus, the GCI indicates the ease, or lack of it, for women to move up the hierarchical ladder in their profession, compared to men.

A value of one for the GCI shows that there is no bias between men and women regarding promotion. The EU value averaged over 27 countries is 1.7, showing that there is a glass ceiling effect where women are under-represented.

In the bar chart showing the values of the GCI for the 27 countries, there is an anomalous spike for Malta which ranks last. The “thickness” of the GCI is 11.7 for Malta followed by 3.7 for Cyprus and ending with a winning 1.1 for Ireland. Though a glass ceiling effect can be observed in all countries, its magnitude differs considerably among them.