How do we ensure that the best candidate for a professorship is hired, while still securing gender balance and diversity? A new study shows how committees that hire professors struggle to meet different expectations.
“I felt that now I need to give something back,” says Letizia Jaccheri. She was named this year’s ODA Awards Woman and recently won a gender equality award at NTNU.
Ulf Sverdrup, Director of NUPI, is seeking talented researchers among students with immigrant backgrounds. He is calling for a new diversity programme.
When universities and university colleges look to increase their ethnic diversity, they often choose the path of internationalization. “In Norway, we are by no means done discussing what diversity really means,” says Beret Bråten.
A new survey report reveals that many Norwegian research institutes lack action plans and that no universities are satisfied with their efforts to increase ethnic diversity.
More than a year has passed since a virus pandemic shut down most of society, including the university and university college sector. Researchers with young children as well as teaching duties and research to conduct have been squeezed the hardest, according to recent research.
“My impression is that many PhD students and post-docs get used as workhorses on research projects,” says a former employee representative for researchers.
Headhunting top international researchers does not necessarily make academia more diverse. Diversity is not achieved by hiring from a pool of academics from well-known US universities, says Mariel Aguilar-Støen.
But the vast majority of them are foreign researchers. Immigrants educated in Norway and descendants of immigrants are underrepresented in Norwegian academia, new statistics show.
The top five news articles in 2020 deal with topics such as sexual harassment, discrimination, COVID-19's effect on scientific productivity, and new EU demands for gender equality plans.
According to the science hierarchy, sociology has low status whereas mathematics has high status. Both this hierarchy and the peer-review process have characteristics that structurally downgrade women’s position in academia.
A Norwegian gender equality committee won the poster competition at a large EU conference held recently in Brussels. The winning poster was “Mission: Gender Balance”.
Uppsala University in Sweden is proud of its new tool that reveals gender balance at the touch of a keyboard. Gudrun Schyman of the Feminist Initiative is positive towards the tool, as are Ministers Tora Aasland and Audun Lysbakken. Norwegian educational institutions, however, seem sceptical.
The Norwegian Government’s national budget for 2012 does not allocate any funding to the Research Council of Norway’s initiative on Gender Balance in Senior Positions and Research Management (BALANSE). Executive Director Anders Hanneborg confirms that the initiative is in danger of being discontinued.
