The Technische Universität Darmstadt takes a skeptical view of policies aimed at selectively promoting the interests of women engaged in academic research and favoring women when selecting candidates for top scientific positions. As Professor Dr. Hans Jürgen Prömel, president of the TU Darmstadt, put it, “We have created a special initiative program that has fundamentally changed our appointment policies and will give us more women professors.”

The TU Darmstadt’s research-oriented, nondiscrimination standards

Although the TU Darmstadt’s research-oriented, nondiscrimination standards are based on guidelines issued by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG), they are intended to be more comprehensive than the DFG’s guidelines and cover more aspects than a program applying to the German states recently launched by the Federal Ministry of Education. As Professor Dr. Petra Gehring, vice-president of the TU Darmstadt, put it, “The guiding principle of our approach is abandoning the policy of appointing a certain number of women to professorships or setting up special funds for establishing professorships available to women only and, instead, amending our appointment procedures on an ongoing basis. We intend to overhaul all of our regular appointment procedures,” which will “generate incentives for maintaining transparency, devoting special attention to avoiding discrimination based on sex, and promote greater senses of responsibility on the part of all members of the university’s staff.” Female members of the university’s staff had rather low opinions of vague, symbolic policies anyhow, since “Being as specific as possible and offering more than merely lip service and declarations of good intentions eminently suit a technical university.”

Promoting the interests of individual female candidates will not be enough

Dr. Uta Zybell, the TU Darmstadt’s women’s-interests officer, stated that, “It has long been well known that there are too few women researchers and professors at universities.” As of 2007, on average, only 14 % of the professorships, exclusive of junior professorships, at German universities were held by women. At the TU Darmstadt, only 10.2 % of professorships and 10.9 % of junior professorships are currently held by women. According to Dr. Zybell, “Long-term efforts aimed at promoting the interests of female candidates on an individual basis have failed to produce the intended, quantitatively manifest effect by a large margin. The percentage of women involved in every discipline becomes much too low no later than the doctoral-candidate and postdoctoral stages. I am optimistic that our initiative program will allow us to change that at the TU Darmstadt.”

Placing more emphasis on recruiting and headhunting

A key factor that is particularly, but not exclusively, applicable to the technical disciplines is that steps aimed at identifying suitable female candidates must be undertaken prior to publication of solicitations for applications for professorships. Are any excellent domestic or foreign female candidates known? Do we have any contacts to industrial researchers active in the particular fields of expertise sought? Can visits by talented candidates be arranged? In view of the usual practice of acquiring the necessary qualifications in the engineering disciplines while working in industry, in the future, the early work in conjunction with appointment procedures will place greater emphasis on recruiting and headhunting. The departments involved may access central facilities for conducting worldwide searches and obtaining outside counseling.

In the future, lists of the names of prospective female candidates, or proof that no suitable female candidates could be identified following conduct of worldwide searches, will be required at the TU Darmstadt before solicitations of applications for professorships will be released for publication. The specific searches that were conducted must be documented in all appointment reports. Every appointment committee must include at least one woman scientist having full voting rights. Committee chairpersons and senate delegates must make certain that female members of appointment committees are treated equally. Female assessors must be allowed to participate in the evaluations of lists of candidates. Appointment negotiations must include solutions that will take due account of the mutual interests of dual-career couples, wherever necessary. Although the field of knowledge transfer has traditionally been dominated by men, that tradition need not be continued indefinitely.

The TU Darmstadt has extended its existing networks by employing women from industry and nonacademic research institutions. In the event that it fails to significantly improve the percentage of female honorary professors, establishment of a quota system will be considered. Above-average numbers of women receiving doctorates will be rewarded by increasing departmental funding appropriations.

Specific aid programs

The TU Darmstadt offers seminars on topics, such as diversity management and mentoring proficiency, for male and female lecturers, provides financial support to foreign scholarship students and female science students with children, and offers female science students a “resumption” option in the event that their studies are interrupted by pregnancy and childbirth. Decision-making and supervisory bodies, such as the university senate, university higher-education council, and the various research organizations at the TU Darmstadt, have undertaken commitments to increase the numbers of women among their members. Finally, a new award that will reward “best-practice” recruiting models that will increase feminine representation at all levels, from the student level to the professorship level, at the TU Darmstadt has been established. The background of those measures is recent studies of the nature of the problem, namely, that women are hesitant to picture themselves in the roles of scientists or professors. In counseling doctoral candidates, encouragement is as important as promptly and frankly addressing the matter of career planning. Postdoctoral and teaching fellowships will be essential if young, female scientists are to be motivated to remain in the sciences after they have received their doctorates or qualified for a teaching career. In addition to junior professorships, the TU Darmstadt offers women part-time employment contracts, in the sense of “resumption” options, as alternatives to the “resumption scholarships” available for various positions, that will allow them to resume their former positions following pregnancy absences or child-rearing leave.