Digital Document (pdf, doc, ppt, txt, etc.)

This is a report on Gender Summit 9 - Europe, which took place in November 2016. Women were not the only ones speaking at the this Gender Summitin in Brussels. Men, too, spoke out about the challenges posed by gender inequality and how to address this issue – in conversations as well as formal presentations. Afterwards, one of them used the phrase “He for She” to describe the benefits of having men advocate for gender equity on behalf of not only women but society as a whole. It was Dr. B. Mario Pinto, President of the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, who will be organizing the 11th Gender Summit in Canada this fall.

Dr. Pinto was referring to the HeForShe movement, which was created by UN Women as a platform for men and boys to “become change agents for the achievement of gender equality.”

So why is it important? Dr. Pinto acknowledged the reality that some people are still more likely to be influenced by men. Plus, with men still holding the majority of senior management positions in academia and industry, they’re in a position to spread the word further.

The Institute of Physics Improving Gender Balance (IGB) project was launched in 2014, as part of the Stimulating Physics Network, funded by the Department for Education. It worked with 20 schools in total and trialed school interventions separately that aimed to:

a) improve the confidence and resilience of girls
b) improve the experience of girls in the physics classroom
c) enable students and staff to understand and address the impact of unconscious bias and gender stereotyping

A second project, funded buy the Drayson Foundation, investigated the cumulative impact of these interventions. This report sets out the forms those interventions took, the results they gave and recommendations on how to improve gender balance in schools based on what was learned.

Main recommendations

We recommend that schools combine the following in a blended approach.
- Appoint a gender champion, someone senior in the leadership team who is able to drive change within the school
- Analyse progression data by gender for different subjects and discuss what might be driving any gendered patterns
- Train teachers to understand unconscious bias, how the experiences of girls and boys may differ because of it and what they can do to manage that impact
- Equip teachers to deal with sexist bullying and language
- Raise students' awareness and engagement of the gender stereotypes they face and engage them in addressing them
- Review the options process:look at the options information and presentations through a gender lens and equip students to engage critically with the process
- Consider project-led science clubs that encourage a better gender balance

Background: Women’s participation in medicine and the need for gender equality in healthcare are increasingly recognised, yet little attention is paid to leadership and management positions in large publicly funded academic health centres. This study illustrates such a need, taking the case of four large European centres: Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin (Germany), Karolinska Institutet (Sweden), Medizinische Universität Wien (Austria), and Oxford Academic Health Science Centre (United Kingdom).

Case: The percentage of female medical students and doctors in all four countries is now well within the 40–60% gender balance zone. Women are less well represented among specialists and remain significantly under-represented among senior doctors and full professors. All four centres have made progress in closing the gender leadership gap on boards and other top-level decision-making bodies, but a gender leadership gap remains relevant. The level of achieved gender balance varies significantly between the centres and largely mirrors country-specific welfare state models, with more equal gender relations in Sweden than in the other countries. Notably, there are also similar trends across countries and centres: gender inequality is stronger within academic enterprises than within hospital enterprises and stronger in middle management than at the top level. These novel findings reveal fissures in the ‘glass ceiling’ effects at top-level management, while the barriers for women shift to middle-level management and remain strong in academic positions. The uneven shifts in the leadership gap are highly relevant and have policy implications.

Conclusion: Setting gender balance objectives exclusively for top-level decision-making bodies may not effectively promote a wider goal of gender equality. Academic health centres should pay greater attention to gender equality as an issue of organisational performance and good leadership at all levels of management, with particular attention to academic enterprises and newly created management structures. Developing comprehensive gender-sensitive health workforce monitoring systems and comparing progress across academic health centres in Europe could help to identify the gender leadership gap and utilise health human resources more effectively. 

This case study of a typical U.S. particle physics experiment explores the issues of gender bias and how it affects the academic career advancement prospects of women in the field of physics beyond the postdoctoral level; we use public databases to study the career paths of the full cohort of 57 former postdoctoral researchers on the Run II Dzero experiment to examine if males and females were treated in a gender-blind fashion on the experiment. 

In our study we follow the career paths of the full cohort of postdoctoral researchers who collaborated on the Run II Dzero experiment between 1998 and the end of 2006, and who have since moved on to another job. In this study, similar to Wenneras and Wold, we assess the productivity of each researcher in our sample, and then examine whether or not the reward (in this case conference presentations, in the case of Wenneras and Wold, postdoctoral research grants) is gender-blind. We also determine whether or not the number of physics conference presentations allocated to a female researcher is associated with her prospects of academic career advancement. 

The study finds that the female researchers were on average significantly more productive compared to their male peers, yet were allocated only 1/3 the amount of conference presentations based on their productivity. The study also finds that the dramatic gender bias in allocation of conference presentations appeared to have significant negative impact on the academic career advancement of the females. 
The author has a PhD in particle physics and worked for six years as a postdoctoral research scientist, five of which were spent collaborating at Fermilab. She is currently completing a graduate degree in statistics.