Teresa Rees, professor emerita of social sciences at Cardiff College, who has died of most cancers aged 74, was an enthusiastic and efficient campaigner for gender equality, and performed an necessary position in bringing about change in universities and in how public coverage selections are made in Wales and the European Union. She fervently believed within the capability of analysis to enhance the place of ladies in training, coaching and the labour market.
As one of many “seven smart girls” who suggested the European Fee on its Mainstreaming Communication to the Council of Ministers (1996), Terry helped embed the “gender mainstreaming” method into EU policy-making. The laws of the Seventies had diminished the gender pay hole, however had little impact on the entrenched focus of ladies in low-paid, usually part-time work. Mainstreaming makes an attempt to deal with this by guaranteeing that no coverage resolution will be taken with out an evaluation first being made from its impression on equal alternatives (EO). Employers are held to account via common gender monitoring.
As equal alternatives commissioner for Wales from 1996 to 2002, and a kind of advising on equality issues when the Nationwide Meeting for Wales (now the Senedd) was arrange in 1999, Terry additionally influenced the Welsh authorities’s “public sector equality obligation”, which obliges public our bodies in Wales to contemplate EO in all selections.
In 2015 Terry was made a dame. The investiture was the second time she had met Queen Elizabeth II; on the primary event, a lunch at Buckingham Palace, Terry defined the thought of mainstreaming. When the Succession to the Crown Act was handed in 2013, giving feminine youngsters equal rights to their brothers within the line of succession, Terry claimed that Her Majesty had clearly acquired the message.
Terry was born in Wells, Somerset, oldest of the three youngsters of Vera (nee Geddes-Ruffle) and Gordon Baggs, who ran a profitable leather-based clothes enterprise, for which Terry typically modelled in her teenagers. She went as a boarder to Clifton highschool in Bristol, then studied sociology and politics at Exeter College, the place, surprisingly, she turned a eager cheerleader.
In 1973 Terry moved to Wales, quickly becoming a member of College Faculty, Cardiff (which turned Cardiff College) as a analysis fellow. In 1974 she married Gareth Rees, a fellow sociologist at Cardiff. They labored collectively on many tasks on the labour market, training and coaching in Wales and later travelled with their sons, Ieuan and Dyfrig, to spend intervals of time at universities in Canada and Australia.
In 1988 Terry was appointed director of the Social Analysis Unit at Cardiff. She carried out analysis on and for commerce unions, evaluated coaching offered by employers together with the civil service, was an early assessor of the impression of IT on girls’s employment, and specialised in insurance policies to enhance the employment of ladies in science, expertise and drugs. She represented Wales on the Nationwide Equality Panel and contributed to their 2010 report An Anatomy of Financial Inequality within the UK.
Terry was one among a small workforce at Cardiff who, regardless of opposition from sceptical colleagues, launched a part-time MSc in girls’s research in 1987, the primary of its sort in Wales. This course provided locations to mature skilled girls, some with out first levels, and its graduates have been represented among the many first elected members of the Nationwide Meeting for Wales.
After a interval as professor of labour market research at Bristol College (1995-2000), Terry returned to Cardiff as professor for social sciences. There she mixed analysis on gender mainstreaming with, from 2004, the position of professional vice-chancellor for employees and college students, then, between 2007 and 2010, professional vice-chancellor for analysis, the primary lady to carry the submit.
With a heat and witty fashion of management, Terry was a help and inspiration to colleagues, encouraging them to work on matters they actually cared about. She advocated and practised a workforce method to analysis and policy-making. She was a gifted communicator who made her factors merely and with humour. At any equality-related occasion in Wales, London or Brussels, in the end somebody would come as much as her and say “‘Terry, you won’t keep in mind me however your recommendation … your suggestion … your introduction to … modified my life.”
From 1992 onwards she was a marketing consultant to the EU on EO and coaching coverage, and engaged in collaborative analysis tasks together with the European Know-how Evaluation Community experiences (2000, 2010), which helped to alter the best way the EU and member states assess the standard of analysis, and the Feminine Empowerment in Science and Know-how Academia report. Terry was additionally on the steering group for the Welsh authorities’s 2016 report on girls and STEM-related examine and careers. Her analysis confirmed how girls step by step fall behind their male counterparts in STEM careers, and she or he argued that gender blindness can result in unhealthy science and selections – for example if girls are ignored in medical analysis and automotive design.
She chaired two “Rees experiences” for the Welsh authorities on the right way to help college students in larger and additional training: Investing in Learners (2001), which led to the introduction of a grant subsidising college students’ upkeep prices; and Truthful and Versatile Funding (2005), which really useful the introduction of top-up charges.
Terry’s final analysis position at Cardiff got here as principal investigator for the WAVE (Ladies Including Worth to the Financial system) mission, which started in 2012, however she was compelled to step down two years later after her analysis with mind most cancers.
Terry’s marriage was dissolved in 2004. She is survived by Ieuan and Dyfrig, her grandchildren, Alanna, Harri, Gruffudd, Caio and Betsan, and her brothers, Stephen and Simon.
