Some 22 per cent of professors – 4,415 out of 19,750 in total - were female in 2013-14 compared with just 15 per cent in 2003-04, according to a report by the Higher Education Statistics Agency.

The report, titled Staff in Higher Education 2013-14, which was published on 26 February, also says 45 per cent of the UK’s 194,245 academic staff are women.

A third of senior academic staff, excluding professors, are women, the report explains.

Women outnumber men in non-academic positions, taking 63 per cent of around 201,000 non-academic staff roles, it adds. Some 54 per cent of managerial, professional and technical staff, and 82 per cent of clerical staff, are women, Hesa also says.

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The statistics also show the age of the UK’s academic workforce, indicating that about 3 per cent of staff (5,245 people) are older than the previous default retirement age of 65, which was scrapped in 2011.

Around 9 per cent of professors are over the age of 65, it adds.

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Hesa also says there are 25 professors under the age of 30 working in the UK, of whom 10 are women.

Among those to previously gain the accolade at such a young age include Mervyn King, the former Bank of England governor, who became the University of Birmingham’s youngest professor in the late 1970s when he was given a chair at the age of 29.

Enoch Powell, the controversial former Tory MP and minister, was made a professor of classics at the University of Sydney at the age of 25, while philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche became a professor at the University of Basel aged 24 – before he had completed his PhD.

jack.grove@tesglobal.com