The High Court has rejected an appeal by Eleanor O’Higgins over University College Dublin’s decision not to promote her to professor in 2007, finding no error of law in the Labour Court’s handling of her discrimination claim.
The appeal, heard under section 90(1) of the Employment Equality Acts, challenged a Labour Court determination made on 11 January 2013. The Labour Court had found that the circumstances raised a prima facie inference of sex discrimination, but that the University had rebutted it. The High Court’s judgment, delivered by Mr Justice Cooke on 8 November 2013, rejected the appeal on the point of law before it; it did not decide whether O’Higgins should have received promotion.
O’Higgins had been a tenured Senior Lecturer at UCD and has since retired from that post, while continuing to teach on a fixed-term contract. The 2007 scheme was a periodic promotion process based on published criteria, with no cap on the number of successful applicants. Of 19 applicants, four were women; eight people were promoted, including two women.
O’Higgins’s application had support from her school, her referee and external assessors. The Committee gave five reasons for refusing promotion, including the volume and impact of her publications, PhD supervision, funding, academic leadership and contribution to University management. At the Labour Court, she argued that her qualifications equalled or exceeded those of male comparators who were promoted, and relied in part on the Committee’s composition—12 men and one woman—and the absence of minutes or notes of its deliberations.
The Labour Court treated those circumstances cumulatively as sufficient to raise an inference of discrimination. It then accepted evidence from Professor Scott, a Committee member, that the application was assessed against the published criteria and that the Committee concluded she had not met the required standard. The Labour Court also considered the promotion outcomes in 2007 and 2006 and found no pattern indicating a preference for men.
The High Court said the Labour Court’s task was to decide whether the particular promotion decision had been tainted by gender bias, not to reassess the academic merits of O’Higgins’s application or compare candidates’ achievements. It held that the Labour Court had considered the relevant material and that the appeal arguments sought, in substance, a different conclusion on the facts rather than identifying an error of law.
The appeal was therefore rejected. The High Court did not overturn the Labour Court’s determination that a prima facie case had been raised and rebutted; the University’s 2007 decision not to promote O’Higgins remained in place.