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12 septembre 2011

Germany: State to set 'quota' for women professors

http://www.universityworldnews.com/layout/UW/images/logoUWorld.gifBy Michael Gardner. North Rhine-Westphalia's state government intends to introduce new legislation to encourage the promotion of more women to professorships. The state is currently below the federal German average.
The ruling Social Democrat-Green coalition has proposed a flexible quota that would vary across departments. The target would be to achieve the same percentage of women professors as the percentage of women qualifying as university lecturers in a faculty.
In turn, the share of women doctoral candidates would ideally depend on the number of women students. Universities actually reaching these levels would be entitled to more government funding. On a federal scale, 49.8% of students were women in 2008, and 41.9% of doctoral students were women. But women accounted for just 17.4% of professors. At only 16.6%, North Rhine-Westphalia was slightly below that level in 2008, although the percentage of women had grown by 7% over the previous 10 years.
At 52%, North Rhine-Westphalia was able to boast an above-average share of women students. Even so, women occupied just 19% of the rectors' offices in the state, and a mere 11% of faculty and department management teams. The figures were published in the first North Rhine-Westphalian Gender Report, which appeared earlier this year. The report was compiled by the North Rhine-Westphalian Women's and Gender Research Network, which is based at Duisburg-Essen University and supported by the state government. It involves around 180 women academics throughout the state, and plans to issue a report every three years.
"At the current pace of developments, it would take another half a century to reach balanced figures," Svenja Schulze, North Rhine-Westphalia's Higher Education Minister, commented when the report appeared. "This is a waste of opportunities and talent that we can no longer accept."
The state government had already announced that it was committed to 40% of executive positions to be held by women, and Schulze stressed that it was important for universities to pursue this goal. However, the new Social Democrat-Green proposals have been rejected by the opposition Free Democrats (FDP). "A university governed by quota with quota professors and quota rectors is no solution," said the FDP's Ingrid Pieper-von Heiden.
Meanwhile, two North Rhine-Westphalian higher education institutions, Dortmund Technical University and Ruhr University Bochum, are already taking part in a scheme launched by the Federal and State Government Joint Commission on Education Planning, under which faculties appointing women professors are awarded a EUR30,000 (US$42,200) bonus. Sixteen percent of Dortmund's professors are female, roughly corresponding to the state average.
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