The KIF Committee’s strategy for its work with gender balance and ethnic diversity in research up to 2017 has been completed. Feedback from the sector shows that the institutions appreciate the committee’s active role, but they would like a clearer definition of “ethnic diversity”.
When the Research Council recently selected 17 new Centres for Research-driven Innovation, one-third of them had women at the helm. According to the Research Council, an awareness-raising campaign was the main reason for the increase.
“If Norwegian researchers do a better job of fulfilling the EU requirements on gender perspectives in research, they will have a competitive advantage in Horizon 2020,” says Curt Rice.
There are sound legal arguments both for and against allowing the niqab to be worn at higher education institutions. A ban can send a clear signal in support of gender equality, but it can also be exclusionary and lead to more extreme attitudes.
It is more difficult for women to meet the requirements to qualify for tenure track positions, according to one researcher.
When the daily newspaper VG presented Norway’s top 20 economists, there was not a single woman among them. “Economics is a male-dominated field,” states economist Karen Helene Ulltveit-Moe of the University of Oslo.
She is future oriented in her work to bring diversity and change to the IT field, but Oda Award winner Beathe Due thinks it is just as important to be aware of the past when working for change. “It’s worth remembering that information technology has not always been a man’s field,” says Due.
Now that government award schemes for gender equality efforts in academia have been discontinued, it is up to each individual institution to improve the gender balance in senior-level academic positions.
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.
Norwegian researcher networks in fields with an uneven gender balance can once again apply for financial support from the Committee for Gender Balance in Research (KIF). The application deadline is November 1st.
In 2007, the rector of the Norwegian Academy of Music said the institution would implement measures to improve the uneven gender balance among academic employees. He cited figures showing that only three professors were women while 41 were men. Now as 2011 draws to a close, only seven professors are women and 53 are men. Minister Tora Aasland is not pleased.
