Professor Claire Gormley is a statistician and is a full professor in the UCD School of Mathematics and Statistics and a funded investigator in Insight.

What one thing would you change/introduce to widen the career paths of women in your field?

In academia, the impact of an automatic research trimester for faculty after a period of leave (whether maternity leave, carer’s leave, sick leave and so-on) has the potential to be the difference between someone getting back into research or them leaving or stagnating in academia, adding to the `leaky pipeline’. While such a research trimester is becoming more prevalent, the change I would make would be to ensure widespread, automatic implementation of this across the Irish higher education system, with the funding required to support this being made available centrally.