Promoting Equal Opportunities as an NCCR – What’s in a Name?
Without women, the nccr – on the move would stand still. The promotion of female academic careers was one of the declared structural goals of the NCCRs (National Centres of Competence in Research) upon the creation of this instrument in the late 1990s and it continues to be so. But are we expecting too much?
The first contribution to this series argued that biases and stereotypes are pervading and one of the structural difficulties women face when embarking upon an academic career. To sensitize the members of the nccr – on the move community, we released a set of recommendations with the aim of detecting and neutralizing gender bias in the hiring process before the recruitment for the second phase. They included optional measures, such as standardizing the questionnaire and the evaluation raster beforehand or verbalizing the prejudices and biases of the members of the board. These recommendations target only the hiring of PostDocs and doctoral students, but are nonetheless a first important step. As the figures on the composition of the NCCR show, we have been successful at creating a good gender balanced community at the level of the Fellows, with slightly more female researchers (47% of the doctoral students and 70% of PostDocs). At the stage of the Project Leaders, the situation is slightly different (40% women), whereby at this level the NCCR can exert only little influence. If NCCRs incite the creation of permanent positions in their home institutions, senior network members are present at the selection procedures. In all other cases, the appointing at the senior levels, however, remains the job of our partner institutions.
Promoting Equal Opportunities of Early-Stage Researchers
Once the Fellows, the doctoral students and PostDocs, take up their contracts, all NCCRs have the mandate to improve their career chances by providing them with training and mentoring in different academic and non-academic areas. By trying to create a gender-sensitive environment, we can offer a favorable milieu, in which women and men in early career stages interact with senior (female) researchers who function as role models and at times assume a mentoring function. This provides, particularly female researchers, with the possibility of compensating their purported difficulties to harness networks often addressed in peer mentoring groups likewise.
In addition, a series of measures have been put in place to support the male and female Fellows of the NCCR community with parental duties. This is done by administering the instruments the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) provides us with and by mobilizing own resources for the support of male and female researchers.
Structural Limits to What NCCRs Can Do… And Why It Is Still Worth Doing It
Whatever the nccr – on the move does, or even all generations of NCCRs together do, there are structural changes and power struggles that supersede our competences and our sphere of influence. That is why, when seen against the backdrop of persistent structural disadvantages, the efforts of an NCCR in the areas of training, mentoring, networking and childcare support are no small feat.
A comprehensive report commissioned to measure the impact of the measures to guarantee the equal opportunities of women and men adopted by the NCCRs of the first generation was published in 2014. The conclusion confirms the disappointing experience that the NCCRs have been making in this strategical field. Not only were the goals of the Swiss National Science Foundation vague, and therefore hardly measurable, in relation to equal opportunities. The NCCRs could not, and I would argue still cannot, benefit from the integration of their individual strategies into a national action plan with a clear position in relation to the connection between Equal Opportunities and Excellence (Stutz et al. 2014). Some NCCRs could, as the nccr – on the move, promote the role model of female academics and provide financial support to members of the community with childcare duties. However, projects that are limited in time and only have a partial influence on the appointment procedures of the partner universities are bound to have a modest impact.
Although the NCCRs have higher flexibility and freedom in certain areas, such as training, than the participating universities, a more substantial effort is required if they shall achieve more than what the equality offices are reaching in their own institutions. The analysis of the impact of the equal opportunities policies of the first generation of NCCRs indicates that a more profound shift is needed at the level of the Research Council. If Equal Opportunities is a national goal, several things are needed: binding structural objectives, plans to achieve them and instruments to measure their success, as well as a clear statement about the relationship between academic excellence and gender mainstreaming.
The NCCRs were supposed to have a pioneer character in the Swiss research scene. This pioneering function could have been used to test other models to increase the presence of women at the highest positions of the academic hierarchies by for example, introducing quotas in the fields in which women are underrepresented, or by applying the cascade model which uses as a numerical goal for each step in the hierarchy the number of women who were represented in the inferior step. For this to be possible, a contract would need to be signed between the NCCRs and the partner universities for which they would be jointly held accountable. This would imply introducing changes at the structural level in most of the partner universities. As an aside, the composition of the international review boards of the NCCRs are, almost 20 years after the beginning of the NCCR scheme, not egalitarian in gender terms.
Nonetheless, if disadvantages accumulate over time, so do advantages. Although we are not in the position to implement measures that will have a clear influence on the power structures of the universities or the policy makers, we believe in the empowering role of equal opportunities policy measures and in the creation of gender awareness among the new generation of researchers. Ultimately, it will be the example of female academics, who have successfully built upon their experience at the nccr – on the move, that will attest to the success of our instruments for the furthering of women’s careers.
Raquel Delgado Moreira is the current Education, Careers and Equal Opportunities Officer of the nccr – on the move. Trained as a philosopher and a historian of science, she has doctorated, published and taught in the (very masculine) European history of natural philosophy in the 17th century, while at Imperial College London and ETH. She stepped out of academia after her postdoctoral phase and has held different non-academic positions ever since.
References:
– Stutz, Heidi et al. (2014). Büro für Arbeits- und Sozialpolitische Studien BASS, Die Förderung der Gleichstellung von Frau und Mann in den Nationalen Forschungsschwerpunkten NFS der ersten Serie: Beitrag zur Wirkungsprüfung des NFS-Instruments.
