Promoting Gender Equality

Gender will no longer count when students are admitted to Swedish universities and university colleges. Sweden’s Minister for Higher Education and Research Tobias Krantz says that preferential treatment based on gender has hit talented female students especially hard.

Four of the five women who took part in the promotion course at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in 2008 were promoted to full professor this year. May Thorseth is one of them.

Luisa Prista of the European Commission does not want to “fix” female researchers. It is the institutions and research system that need to be changed, she believes. Her goal is that the Member States will be mobilized to care about gender equality in research.

Women are taking over the universities, according to the newspapers. But just because the majority of students are women, does this necessarily mean that women will eventually dominate the academic disciplines?

In just a few short years, they saw the number of women in permanent academic positions go from zero to four. Three of them are now professors. “We needed to strengthen our department and realized that the measures established by the central administration held great potential,” explains Jan-Eirik Angell Killie of the Norwegian College of Fishery Science.

“The Kif committee does a crucial job. It will be exciting to serve on it,” says Elisabet Ljunggren, Senior Researcher at the Nordland Research Institute. Ljunggren is one of the members of the new Committee for Gender Balance in Research (the Kif committee).

Women in academia publish 21 per cent less than their male colleagues, and this figure has been stable for nearly 20 years. A new master’s thesis takes a look behind the numbers.

“We now have a unique historical opportunity to do something about the gender imbalance in Norwegian research,” says Professor Hanne Haavind, who has recruiting advice for leaders who want to seize the day.