The "Women Professors Forum" - a network just for female professors - was launched at the university a few weeks ago. In this interview, founder Katharina Al-Shamery explains how she and her colleagues want to help young female scientists.
QUESTION: Prof Dr Al-Shamery, the natural sciences are still described as a male domain in which it is more difficult for women to reach the top. However, you yourself made a name for yourself years ago as a chemist. Are you the exception to the rule?
AL-SHAMERY (laughs): You could interpret it that way. But I also had to learn the hard way: Men and women really are different. Men have to establish vertical hierarchies first, whereas women have to network horizontally when they are working on something. This results in a whole range of specific behaviours. I didn't realise this before and wasted a lot of energy because I simply didn't understand why I found it so difficult to assert myself. The younger female colleagues in particular are completely unaware of these differences. They think: "I'm good, so I'll automatically assert myself. What's the point of gender equality measures then?" The fact is, however, that female scientists are still underrepresented in many disciplines, especially in management positions. Not only in the natural sciences, by the way. I'm also thinking of economics, philosophy, music and history, for example. The proportion of women among professors at our university is just over 25 per cent - that is a comparatively good figure, but there is certainly room for improvement.
QUESTION: There are already various support programmes and opportunities for female academics. Why do we still need a Women Professors Forum?
AL-SHAMERY: We see ourselves as mentors for young female academics, but we also want to support each other. Twelve "movers and shakers" from the university took part in the <link owpf/ - external-link-new-window>Women Professors Forum</link> when it was launched in October. But unlike the more elitist, nationwide AcademiaNet project, for example, we promote a broader localised approach. We are not only aimed at women starting out in their careers, but also at women who have already made good progress but have not yet made it to the top. We want to help them by putting them forward for awards, for example. That's what the men do among themselves, too - they protect each other. First and foremost, we want to make female scientists and their research visible so that they have the chance to make a career at all.
QUESTION: Making women visible? What do you mean by that - they're not hiding in their offices, are they?
AL-SHAMERY: Certainly not, but women are often less present at international conferences than their male colleagues. Only very rarely do they get the chance to give a keynote speech. If they have children, it is virtually impossible for them to travel to Asia or the USA several times a year for a week or longer. However, attending these specialist conferences is essential for making progress in science.
QUESTION: And how do you intend to help?
AL-SHAMERY: By joining forces as women and making this imbalance an issue. We are working intensively with ETH, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich and Ruhr University Bochum, where such networks of female professors have existed for some time. My colleague, the physicist Professor Dr Ursula Keller from ETH, who is very well known in specialist circles, recently published a paper in a physics journal in which she raises some of the questions that we believe are crucial: How can parents working in science be enabled to attend conferences via childcare, among other things? How can female postdocs be supported during the particularly crucial career phase of pregnancy so that it does not become a career break? She refers to a study in which particularly famous, highly competitive scientific centres of excellence in the USA sometimes do not even employ female postdocs because they fear a loss of productivity for the working group during pregnancy. It must surely be possible for women to continue to contribute their ideas during maternity leave and parental leave - for example, they could be supported by a doctoral candidate who would continue to advance their research by supervising the postdoc, even if the postdoc is no longer able to be fully present due to family care. In this way, we could avoid this intensive family phase having a negative impact on publication rates and the acquisition of third-party funding. There are also many other things that make it more difficult for women to pursue a career.
QUESTION: Which ones, for example?
AL-SHAMERY: The committee workload is extremely high for them. This has to do with the Lower Saxony Higher Education Act: According to this, the proportion of women and men on committees and appointment commissions should be balanced - which means that in disciplines where women are underrepresented, they have to play an above-average role on committees. To make matters worse, women often try to do things very neatly: they read all the files and scrutinise every application particularly carefully. This can quickly add up to several weeks of work - time that is taken away from their own research. There also needs to be new concepts for relieving the burden on these women or providing them with financial support, for example.
QUESTION: How do you go about this specifically?
AL-SHAMREY: We want to sensitise academics to this situation. The university's Vice President for Gender Equality, Professor Dr Sabine Kyora, has already promised us her support. We are planning special networking events twice a semester at which we will engage in intensive dialogue - regularly supported by external speakers. We also want to draw the public's attention to women-specific events. For example, my colleague Professor Dr Jutta Kunz succeeded in bringing the 2018 Women Physicists' Conference to Oldenburg. Incidentally, we will always send out our events via the female professors' mailing list so that we can hopefully gradually expand the circle of female supporters.
