The Research Council of Norway is planning a large-scale initiative to increase the recruitment of women to high-level positions and research management.

By changing the name to the Committee for Gender Balance in Research, the KIF Committee has received a stricter mandate for its work. “This sends a signal that gender equality involves more than equal rights,” says Mari Teigen, Research Director at the Institute for Social Research (ISF).

Talent at stake. Changing the culture of research – gender-sensitive leadership is designed to inspire everyone who wants to do something to increase diversity and promote greater gender balance within the research sector.

“It is more important for the universities to become adept at marketing the engineering sciences to women rather than designing measures such as gender points to increase their numbers,” says Svandis Benediktsdottir, Gender Equality Adviser at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU).

In March, the Norwegian Nurses Organisation voiced its support for giving gender points to men who want to become nurses. Now the Ministry of Education and Research has given its response: There are no plans at this time to introduce such a measure.

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.

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.

New academic perspectives pave the way for a greater number of women to participate in the discipline, according to Professor of Theology Halvor Moxnes. He has worked hard for the inclusion of gender perspectives in theology, and believes that this is important for the recruitment of female researchers.

“A very surprising and generous recognition of our efforts to promote gender equality,” says Rector Sigmund Loland.