Workshops on the issue of “Women in Science”
FEBS Congress in Vienna, Austria
9th and 11th of July 2007
A workshop and a lunch session was organised at the Vienna meeting. The workshop was organised in collaboration with EMBO.
Workshop
Strategies & Programmes to Facilitate Careers for Women
July 9, 2007
Maaike Romijn, manager of the Mosaic and Aspasia programs of the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) presented the two programs that are aimed at increasing the participation of women scientists and researchers from ethnic minorities in science. Initially the Aspasia program was a program that only supported women imbedded in the VENI, VIDI, VICI program, which supports individual scientists at early postdoc, young group leader and senior group leader positions respectively. The Mosaic program is very successful and is aimed at supporting young scientists (PhD positions) from ethnic minorities. Each year 15 positions are awarded for the whole of The Netherlands including all the scientific disciplines. The main conclusion was that these special programs do help towards improving the gender balance. More information can be found at www.nwo.nl.
Dr. Gerlind Wallon, manager for the EMBO Young Investigator Programme and the Women in Science actions reported on the EMBO investigation on gender dimension and the effect of gender blinding on the selection process. Data was taken from the application documents of the EMBO Long term Fellowship programme (between 1999 and 2006) and from the Young Investigator programme (2002-2004). The main conclusion of the study was that traditional gender roles hold female scientists back. All the results and the analysis can be found at www.embo.org/gender.
The audience asked both EMBO and FEBS (representative) for the organization to do more for Women in Science and suggested mentoring scheme to be set up and possibly some financial support for Women in Science-related activities at a national level.
The workshop was attended by about 80 people.
WISE-Career-Lunch
July 11, 2007
A woman’s career lunch was organized where in a leisurely setting small groups, each consisting of two female senior scientists and 8-10 participants discussed personal career related issues. Participants had to register to attend the wise-career-lunch. A total of about 120 people attended. The response was very positive and many of the participants found the session very useful.
