(CNN) Ireland has announced a new plan to combat gender inequality in higher education by creating women-only professor positions across its universities and technology institutes.

Minister for Higher Education Mary Mitchell O'Connor said the project would ensure that 40% of Ireland's professor-level positions would be held be women by 2024.

Speaking at the Gender Action Plan for Higher Education's launch in Dublin on Sunday, O'Connor said that increasing female representation at the highest academic level would "underpin the transformation and cultural change" necessary to ensure that Ireland's higher education "fully realizes the benefits of gender diversity."

The action plan follows the recommendations of a new gender equality task force report that said that women have been historically underrepresented in senior positions across the country's universities and technological institutes.

Women make up 51% of entry-level teaching jobs in the university sector, but only 24% of professor posts are filled by women, according to the report. There has never been a female president at any of Ireland's seven universities and only two of the 14 presidents in the technology institutes have been women, it said.

Read More