The new KIF Committee has been appointed, and for the first time it has a leader team from both a university and a research institute.

A memo with the probing title “What do we know about class in academia?” was recently published. “We know very little about the relationship between social background and an academic career,” says Edvard Nergård Larsen.

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.

“My impression is that many PhD students and post-docs get used as workhorses on research projects,” says a former employee representative for researchers.

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.

Ulf Sverdrup, Director of NUPI, is seeking talented researchers among students with immigrant backgrounds. He is calling for a new diversity programme.

Foreign women have flocked to temporary researcher positions in the Nordic countries. Without these women there might have been far fewer female post-docs in Norway and Sweden.

Check out our top five most read news articles about COVID-19, the recruitment of top researchers, foreign researchers in Norway and a technology professor with two gender equality awards.

Even though more women researchers are coming from abroad than before, it is often more difficult for a woman to move her family to Norway, asserts researcher Ingvild Reymert.

“We didn’t think that international recruitment would influence the gender balance in academia in favour of more women in senior positions, but we were wrong,” says researcher Kaja Wendt.

Both male and female researchers with children struggle to combine career and family. The competition is coming more and more from international researchers who don't have children or access to welfare benefits such as parental leave.

Norwegian universities are much too concerned with counting international researchers and students, and they care too little about how the researchers are integrated into the environment. This is according to Julien S. Bourrelle, a research fellow at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology.

The number of international researchers in Norway has exploded in the past 10 years. This is in keeping with official targets, but we still know little about what this means for the future of Norwegian research.

A growing number of universities and university colleges are trying to improve more than just the gender balance. Some call it diversity, others call it inclusion or anti-discrimination, but how are the efforts going?