Main Discussion Thread: Recruitment & Promotion of Women Researchers

Hi everyone, here is my contribution and initial post:

Austria continuously scores low on international gender equality indices. For example, the latest PwC Women in Work Index 2015 – in line with Eurostat figures – showed a gender pay gap of 23% and only 65% of women working full time, placing Austria at rank 21 of 33 OECD countries. Also, the 2016 WEF Gender Gap Report placed Austria at rank 52 of 144, also stressing the large gender pay gap and the relatively low participation of women in the labour market (working women: 54%).

At Austrian universities 40% of all academic employees were women in 2015, however, there is a hierarchical decline in female participation with 33% of the newly established tenure-track positions and still only 23% of ordinary professorships belonging to women. On the other hand, women represent around 47% of predoctoral employees and around 42% of doctoral degrees. Apparently, it is the postdoctoral phase and onwards where women slowly disappear. These numbers show what we have also established in various interviews with academics and university management (ESF project Euroac): The most important and difficult career-building years in academe, i.e. the strenuous postdoctoral phase is a bottle-neck which seems to filter out women as it mostly occurs in the thirties to mid thirties and coincides with the childbearing years and the creation of families.

I am – and it is important for me to share this more personal information in this forum – a PhD candidate who one and a half years ago welcomed twins. I have previously also had an interest in the gender perspective; looking back, I must admit, however, that at times I did not fully comprehend the problems associated with childcare-duties, even covertly belittling the constant „excuses“ of colleagues with small children when not handing in a paper on time etc. My understanding of the immense pressures (mostly) women face has changed, to say the least: It is - in my personal view - next to impossible to raise small children at home and at the same time pursue an academic career or advanced degree. In Austria, in the province of Lower Austria where I reside in a suburb of Vienna, childcare for children under the age of three is not free, on the contrary, it amounts to 800 Euro a month for two children three days per week,thus ultimately forcing many, if not most mothers (or fathers) to stay at home or – in the best case - to work part-time. An academic career, however, is hard to pull off part-time. Iresume that while adequate, affordable access to childcare is fundamental in any career and a cornerstone for establishing gender equality, it is even more so important for academic careers, where concentration and deep thought are pivotal. It – or rather the lack of it- is also the primary reason for the current malaise regarding gender equality in Austria. I believe other measures – specific support programmes, trainings or mentoring programmes targeted at women – are valuable, but do not touch upon or solve this most fundamental social problem.

Short bio
I am an organizational theorist who studies higher education, research policy, academic profession and careers. 2007-2011 I was a member of the Gender Group at University of Lugano, Switzerland. The main goal of it was the improvement of academic career paths so that more women could be recruited, promoted, and become academic leaders. In the last years I have worked with my colleagues Bojana Culum (University of Rijeka, Croatia) and Terhi Nokkala (University of Jyväskylä) on early career women in academia. Our main focus has been how female academics understand and construct their social capital to progress in their careers.

Insight on design of efficient measures
The Flagship project (funded by Research Council of Norway) and the EuroAC project (European Science Foundation) have shown that recruitment and promotion are complex processes that need to be thoroughly understood in order to be improved: on the one hand, there are several (and increasing) stages (definition of position, call, selection rounds, interviews and trial lectures, research seminars), on the other hand, multiple actors besides academics are contributing to the final decision (the department, research group, faculty, boards, scientific committee, equality office….). This of course depends from country, university, discipline. If a gender component is not taken into account in every aspect, the risk for women to fall out at some specific phase in the process are higher than for men. This also means that not necessarily all actors involved need to be convinced to share the same ideals on gender equality, but rather that gender-friendly mechanisms can inform and control the whole process.

Effectiveness and sustainability
European policies, national legal frameworks, institutional strategies and quality control are central measures to enhance equal opportunities in science. However, in order to make such measures sustainable, support and development of individual female academics is necessary. Our research on professional networking among early career female academics has shown that junior women tend to consider inappropriate to engage with professional networking, even if it might be useful for the research they are conducting. Our findings seem to indicate that women need (more) time to be socialized into academic practices (like networking for research projects), and even then, they don’t feel completely comfortable. All in all many female academics could be “trained” into these social competences and become more effective and happier in their work. Targeted mentoring programs for PhD students and postdocs can contribute to this, as well as presentation of role models and specific academic development courses.

I form part of the GenPORT consortium.  I coordinated the user needs assessment for the portal in order to make sure that the portal was co-designed with relevant stakeholders. I was also responsible for coordinating the production of six research syntheses and twenty-five policy briefs.  

We have to submit the final version of these policy briefs to the European Commission in April and we would really like to use the opportunity of this online discussion to enrich the policy briefs   focusing on the recruitment and promotion of women researchers. 

Good Afternoon colleagues, my name is Lieketseng Mohlakoana-Motopi, I am a South African and Work for the Commission for Gender Equality which is an independent Constitutional Body mandated to ensure promotion for gender equality in the country. I work as a Researcher and our work is mostly centred on monitoring and evaluation of the implementation of gender related frameworks by government and private sector organisation, to ensure compliance to the international standards as a state party to several international and regional instruments that are geared towards promotion of gender equality in the country.

Good morning from the United States. I provide support for faculty recruitment, development, and retention programs at Virginia Tech, a research intensive university with one of the largest engineering colleges in the country. In 2003, Virginia Tech received a grant from the US National Science Foundation ADVANCE program to increase the participation and success of women in academic science and engineering careers. With support from the university leadership, we reviewed policies and procedures regarding faculty hiring, family accommodations, and leadership development. As part of the initiative, we collected data on the numbers of women in various roles at the university and surveyed male and female faculty about their perceptions of equity in the workplace.

Following completion of the grant, the university continues to support many of the programs developed, and I continue to monitor and report on progress to university leadership. While we have had some success with hiring and retaining more women faculty and promoting more women into leadership roles, progress is still slow.

Prior to joining Virginia Tech as the administrator responsible for implementing the ADVANCE program, I worked as an environmental engineer in the private sector and served as a volunteer leader of the Society of Women Engineers.

Dear colleagues,
My name is Nuria Jane and I am in HR unit at IBEC. My expertise in Gender is already begin and I will oversee the next Equality and Diversity plan in our organization. I’ve been in several seminars and events where the ratio of scientific role women is still low. This is a fact, and we need to resolve it or try to minimize the effects of the diversity in science. In my opinion we do not have keys to resolve the bias but we can try to begin with a few and little consciences in the recruitment process. In our institution, we began to review the recruitment process if doesn’t candidate is a female. We review and discuss the process… This could be a step such other organitzation that are aware with the bias in the formal recruitment process ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g978T58gELo) I strongly encourage that you can hear it and follow this kind of bias. If we stop a little the unconscious bias we could manage in the future not evidence the difference.
On the other hand, why can we support the flexibility hours for researchers? We already have some technological tools to help the communication, and some articles shows that flexibility hours could be managed with more excellence at work and of course more efficiently?

Dear all, 

I am Lidia Arroyo from the GenPORT team (Gender & ICT Research Group- UOC). I hope that all of you enjoy the e-dicussion and after this you continue working with stimulating ideas and connections to further developing gender equality in academia and research. 

Elke Park, thank you for this overview of Austria in terms of the situation of women scientists. In the GenPORT Policy Briefs is detected a good practice in your country for promotion of female researchers: the Elise Richter Programme. This is implemented by the government agency FWF and consist of providing funds for female scientist for post-dcos. Do you know more about this programme?

Perhaps here we can detect similar iniatiatives in other regions such as the US National Science Foundation ADVANCE program that Pegyy Layne presents. Do you know more public or private iniatives destinated to promote female researchers in your countries? 

Lidia

Hi,
My name is Naiara Arri and I am a gender expert in Elhuyar (Basque Country, spain). We are a social sciences consulting entity. At the moment we are involved in the gender and science topic in various ways but mainly because we are part of the PLOTINA consortium. In PLOTINA, Promoting gender balance and inlcusion in research, innovation and training, our role together with Progetto Donna (Italy) is to asses 6 RPOs in their process of designing and implementing a Gender Equality Plan. One of the issues we are looking at in the RPOs is the Recruitment & Promotion of Women Researchers. We have not yet designed the GEPS but would be eager to get to know succesful stories of different initiatives you might know.

Thanks a lot!

With regards to the Lidia’s question Do you know more public or private indicatives destined to promote female researchers in your countries? there is one institution in Spain who incorporated to their political recruitment process the condition to include a woman in the final selection processes for postdoctoral roles. If the recruitment stop without any women positive candidate, the process begins again in totally.

• In Germany the Female Professors Programme funded by BMBF - the German Ministry for Education and Research promotes outstanding women researchers and is in operation until 2017. Since 2008, 270 additional women professors have been appointed to higher education institutions. See Policy Brief 3 
• In Austria the Excellentia programme increased the percentage of female full professors at Austrian universities from 13% (in 2005) to 18% in 2010 - by offering financial incentives to universities that appoint women to the professoriate. See Policy Brief 2

My name is Barbara Read and I am Reader in Gender and Social Inequalities at the University of Glasgow, Scotland, UK. I am a sociologist of education, specialising in qualitative methods and take a feminist poststructuralist approach. I have pre-prepared a short initial contribution which I'll post and then I look forward to reading through the posts and joining in the discussion!

One point that struck me when reading the excellent GenPort policy briefs is that much of what is recommended applies across disciplinary areas in HE, not just in science, although the issue is particularly acute in this area. In the UK men still outnumber women in more senior positions - for example at professorial level in the UK there were only 16% women in 2009 (Women in Science Database, cited in White et al., 2012). Having institutional targets is valuable, but I'd argue we need to continue to encourage a debate on the ‘culture’ of the academy itself. Today, despite sizeable numerical changes in the student body and amongst more junior staff, the cultures of HE institutions in many places can still be seen to reflect the historically dominant construction of the academic as male, middle- or upper-class, and in many cases white. Explicit, transparent appointment and promotion criteria can help to counteract the influence of ‘old boy’s networks’, and provide at least a starting point to examine and work to challenge the forms of experience and practices, behaviours and styles of ‘doing’ the academic role that are preferred by appointing and promotion committees.

However to a certain extent we are dealing with dominant gendered discourses around status and prestige that have been socially dominant for a long time and need concerted multi-sector and multi-disciplinary activities and interventions in order to hope to challenge them – including working with children from the early years sector onwards to try and challenge gender essentialising and stereotyping, and try and counter a differential valuing of professions and disciplinary areas that are seen to have more cultural value and prestige if they are associated with the ‘masculine’ . This can be very complex and hard to do, and I am keen to learn more about ways in which this has been successful.

Hi my name is Gloria Bonder , director of the Gender Society and Public Policies Area at FLACSO, Argentina and coordinator of the UNESCO Regional Chair on Women, Science and Technology in Latin America. Very pleased to have been invited to this conversation
Most of our work is based in Latin America where the kind of policies you are discussing are rare or unexistent. When I think in the possibility of promoting such measures in academies or research councils my concerns has to do with the institutional culture of such institutions and if it is possible and how to change it so that we can move beyond pormoting inclusiveness of women in male or patriarchal cultures. Of course I agree on the need to overcome barriers that impede or refrain women researcher´s careear but I believe we need to rethink and try to find to change the accepted way in which research is done and evaluated both by the research institutions and by society, , the social representations of science and scientists, among other issues that in a more subtle way affect the life and work of women and also men,