Would you like to have a wealth of brilliant female researchers around you? Do you suspect that a mixed, diverse team might be more productive? Are you concerned that open positions at your unit often have more male applicants? Here’s some tips on how to recruit female research talents for top positions.
Your unit will have a professorship coming up in a couple of years‘ time. Become visible internationally & increase your female candidate pool by:
- creating semester programmes of female-researcher-led guest lectures
- creating or advertising existing short-term fellowship opportunities for female researchers
- selecting a majority of women for your unit’s edited editions & conferences
Use an ongoing process of scouting „out of the box“ to become more aware of brilliant women in your field. That can mean:
- going beyond who everyone at your department knows, and beyond who comes to mind first
- making it a task in your regular department meetings to present one female researcher that wasn’t previously known to you
- checking female-only expert databases for your field or blogs devoted to raising visibilty of "women in [field]"
- creating a „pipeline“ by intentionally giving female students, doctoral and postdoctoral researchers transparent information on academic career paths & and the profile that is needed to develop into a desirable candidate
What could a professorship look like to attract a large number of female applicants? Try:
- having a wider denomination
- leaving it open in terms of seniority until you have an overview of candidates (open-rank)
- a top-sharing professorship
- being very transparent with expectations & framework conditions
For all three segments: Make sure you and those around you:
- receive your unit's female visisting researchers enthusiastically
- have fun with brainstorming outside the box
- are aware of personal and systemic biases when serving in hiring committees!
Resources:
- Read on in this useful guide by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - German Research Foundation: fog-empfehlungen-2020-data.pdf (dfg.de)
- Experts like Zita Küng can offer systematic approaches for identifying the wealth of female talents in your field: Die Gute Nachrede® equality (equality-consulting.ch)
This text is the inaugural post of our researcher development blog, reflecting about academic culture and working conditions. More here: Blog - RCC (uni-graz.at)