Form, Function or Fiction: Gender and Diversity in Engineering Programmes in Ireland

Messe agus Pangur Bán, cechtar nathar fria shaindán: bíth a menmasam fri seilgg, mu menma céin im shaincheirdd. I and Pangur Bán, my cat 'Tis a like task we are at; Hunting mice is his delight Hunting words I sit all night. The poem Pangur Bán [1] was written by an unknown Irish monk in the Benedictine Abbey of Reichenau, in southern Germany in the ninth century. The Abbey, founded in 724 by Saint Pirim, was a centre of learning in Europe for many centuries, reaching its apex under Abbot Berno of Reichenau (1008–48). The Christian church was the sole focus of education in the first millennium, with centres of learning developing around monasteries (e.g. Cluain Mhic Nóis in 546 [2]). The Christian religion, based on Hebrew and Greek documents translated into Latin, required scholarship; at the very least, clergy had to be able to read and write Latin. This was less a problem in Italy, France and other countries with a Latin derived language, but was quite challenging for others. The medieval monastic school was quite diverse, with scholars from all over Europe attending the most prestigious. This was greatly facilitated by the universal use of Latin as a lingua franca. Both monasteries and convents had schools, allowing women an equal, albeit separate, scholarly status. The German Benedictine Abbess, Hildegard von Bingen (1098 – 17 September 1179), is one such example, writing sublime hymns, and producing treatises on such diverse topics as theology, medicine and botany. Hildegard’s family were minor nobility, one flaw of the medieval system from the modern point-of-view; men and women could be educated, but only if they were wealthy. [3] Some of these monastic schools, such as Paris (1150), developed into universities in the late middle ages, but most of Europe’s early universities were secular counterparts to the guild system of craft education (e.g. Bologna (1088) and Oxford (1167)). They were seen as a separate community of teachers and students, universitas magistrorum et scholarium, from which is derived ...