University of Exeter ordered to pay compensation to physicist Dr Annette Plaut, who was sacked after 29 years
Photograph: Christopher Thomond/The GuardianPhotograph: Christopher Thomond/The GuardianA senior academic who says she was sacked from her post in a university’s physics department because of her loud voice has been awarded more than £100,000 after winning a claim for unfair dismissal.
“Only in Exeter have I been put under pressure to change this inherent characteristic that is fundamentally integral to me and who I am. I believe that it is the combination of being female and loud that some senior members of the university and HR [human resources] persist in condemning, as this combination contradicts their stereotypical assumptions of how a woman should behave.
Plaut, 59, joined the university in 1990 as the first female academic in the physics department. She said: “I enjoyed my job – I liked teaching and was especially keen on experimental physics research in a laboratory that I had built up over the years from scratch.” She said she would have liked to get her job back but the tribunal’s remedy judgment concluded that this was not practical as there was “entrenched bias against Dr Plaut in the human resources department and in the senior echelons of the university”.
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