It seems, as far as can be judged, that future opportunities are likely to occur when the right candidates for posts are there in sufficient numbers to make their exclusion on the ground of sex, already seldom explicitly stated, impossible or inexpedient.  Meanwhile it is probable that individual women will continue, in some cases, to suffer injustice, while in others, by virtue of their unquestionable attainments and strength of personality, they may attain the positions they desire.  Slow progress is not altogether bad for the ultimate cause of women at the Universities:  nothing could injure that cause so much as mistakes at the initial stage.  An important appointment given to the wrong woman, or to one in any respect inferior to her colleagues, would be used as an argument against further experiment for many years.

University women teachers can best help to secure equality of opportunity by rendering themselves indispensable members of the body corporate.  In their case much is required of those to whom little is given.  Above all they must avoid the temptation to live entirely in the absorbing interests of the present:  they must remember that it is the business of a University to make contributions to learning as well as to teach.  Secondly, they must insist on equality of payment and status when there is any disposition, overt or acknowledged, to differentiate on the score of sex.  It is not right to yield on these points, for an important principle is at stake.  On the other hand the time and place for insistence must be wisely selected, and any claim made must be incontrovertible on the score of justice and practicability.  Lastly, women on committees and elsewhere are not justified in keeping unduly in the background.  When they have something worth contributing to the discussion, it is not modesty but lack of business capacity, which makes them silent.  “Mauvaise honte” is as much out of place as undue pertinacity.  Women who are unwilling or unable to assert themselves when necessary, are not in place at a co-educational University.  Most women, however, will derive intellectual stimulus from the free interchange of opinion, possible only when both sexes are working happily together, with common interests and common aims.

If relatively too much space in this article has been given to women’s work at mixed Universities, the excuse lies ready to hand.  In Women’s Colleges there is, of course, no sex bar, and the way lies clear from the bottom to the top of the ladder.  Conditions of appointment, tenure, and work do not greatly differ from those described, except in so far as the stipends tend to be lower, especially for more responsible posts, when these are ordinarily occupied by women.  It is a sign of the times that in at least one Women’s College in a mixed University, it has been recently necessary to rule that posts are open to men as well as to women, unless it is specially stated to the contrary.  Thus,