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This report provides details of the Capacity Building Workshop “Advancing RTD through Gender-Fair Recruitment and Retention Strategies”, held on 19 – 20 May 2011 at the campus of the University of Vienna. It was one of a series of three workshops held as part of the genSET project, each of which will have an accompanying Capacity Building Report. The reports provide a practical starting point for future replication of the Capacity Building Workshops on the three themes. The following key recommendations emerged from the genSET Capacity Building Workshops and are overarching practical guidelines for conducting workshops that help build participants capacity to take action on gender mainstreaming. The main body of this report provides more in-depth analysis and practical guidelines for holding a workshop on the theme of Gender-Fair Recruitment and Retention Strategies. 

This article draws on data from a qualitative research study undertaken in an old (pre-1992) UK university with the main aim of investigating the issue of the gender dimension of academic careers. It examines the idea of an individualistic academic career that demands self-promotion, which is still used as a measure of achievement by those in senior positions. However, there is a basic contradiction. While this idea is upheld, men simultaneously gain by an in-built patriarchal support system. They do not have to make a conscious effort to be helped by it, thereby perpetuating the cultural hegemony of individualism. Women are not admitted to this support system, and if they are seen as needing or wanting to set up their own system, this is viewed as a weakness. The answer appears to be for women to strategically harness feminist ways of working in a collaborative and supportive way.

Women and men enter graduate programs in biology in about equal numbers, but women are less likely to become academic scientists. Various hypotheses have been suggested to explain this higher rate of attrition, most of which cite family issues as the reason. However, medicine successfully recruits and retains women physicians, despite being less family friendly than biology in terms of workload, stress, and inflexible work hours. Both professions are competitive but at different times in a person's career. Competition for entry into medical school is intense, but this period of competition occurs prior to family formation for most women. For women biologists, the most intense period of competition occurs during the search for faculty positions. Many women have partners or children at this time. The increasing competition for academic positions threatens to reverse the gains that women have made into the professoriate in biology, as well as in other sciences

The debate on the role of women in the academic world has focused on various phenomena that could be atthe root ofthe gender gap seen inmany nations. However, in spite ofthe ever more collaborative character of scientific research, the issue of gender aspects in research collaborations has been treated in a marginal manner. In this article we apply an innovative bibliometric approach based on the propensity for collaboration by individual academics, which permits measurement of gender differences in the propensity to collaborate by fields, disciplines and forms of collaboration: intramural, extramural domestic and international. The analysis ofthe scientific production of Italian academics shows that women researchers register a greater capacity to collaborate in all the forms analyzed, with the exception of international collaboration, where there is still a gap in comparison to male colleagues.