Supporting women
Supporting women
In 1987, the University of Oldenburg became the first higher education institution in Lower Saxony to establish an office for women’s equality. Over the course of its 35-year history, the University of Oldenburg’s gender equality work has achieved a number of successes. Among other things, it has been successfully participating in the federal and state-funded programme to promote female professors since 2008 and is committed to the ‘Research-Oriented Gender Equality Standards’ of the German Research Foundation (DFG). In the DFG’s research-oriented gender equality standards assessment in 2013, the university’s gender equality work was classified in the highest category. Following several successful re-audits, the University of Oldenburg was awarded the ‘family-friendly university’ certificate on a permanent basis. In 2018, the University of Oldenburg’s Future Gender Equality Concept received a positive assessment in the third phase of the Programme for Women Professors. An overview of key events can be found here.
The Chief Gender Equality Officer supports women in academia and higher education, technology and administration:
Personalised advice
The Chief Gender Equality Officer provides individual support to women at the University of Oldenburg:
- She advises female students, graduates and PhD candidates on planning their careers.
- She arranges coaching sessions for female academics to help them prepare for appointment procedures.
- She advises women who feel disadvantaged or discriminated against in their workplace at the university.
- She advises and supports the departmental gender equality officers in the schools, the administration and the central departments on an individual basis.
If you would like to arrange a personal consultation, please contact by email.
Strategic university development and quality assurance
The Chief Gender Equality Officer is involved at a strategic level in development planning and structural decisions, and evaluates the results of their implementation, for example:
- Central Equality Plan, University Development Plan, target agreements
- Further development of procedures to ensure that Gender equality is consistently taken into account in the university’s management processes (research, teaching, administration)
- Research-oriented equality standards of the DFG
- University guidelines addressing gender equality issues, such as the guidelines for appointment management, recruitment policy, and policy against sexual discrimination and violence
Representation of interests and networking
The Chief Gender Equality Officer represents the interests of women at the University of Oldenburg and supports the networking of women:
- Accompanying, supporting and coordinating the decentralised Equal Opportunities Officers in the Schools
- Representing the interests of women in recruitment and appointment procedures
- Networking and coaching in preparation for appointment procedures
- Preparation of information material and contributions in the field of equal opportunities work
Career advancement
The Chief Gender Equality Officer supports women on their career path:
- Development of concepts for information programmes for schoolgirls, female students and female doctoral candidates, in particular for career promotion in the STEM subjects (Mathematics, Computing Science, Natural and Technical Sciences); support for Youth Future Day for girls and boys in Lower Saxony (Girls' Day/Boys' Day at federal level)
- Concept for cross-school mentoring for all qualification levels
- Collaboration in the development of targeted offers for science-related further education for women
Gender equality in research and teaching
The Chief Gender Equality Officer promotes the integration of the ‘gender’ dimension into research and teaching:
- Screening procedures for funding instruments in individual subjects, and methods and theories of women’s and gender studies in teaching and research
- Conceiving and launching the ‘Helene Lange Prize for Early-Career Female Researchers’, which has been awarded annually by the University in co-operation with the EWE Foundation since 2009
- Supportive measures to foster engagement between the academic community and the interested public on key research areas at the University of Oldenburg, taking into account innovative research questions such as those in gender studies.