Women to the Top - "Plugging the Leaky Pipeline"

Women are underrepresented at top-levels of academia. At German universities, only 18 percent of professorships are held by women. One of the reasons for this is the so-called “leaky pipeline”: even though there are more female than male first-year students, significantly more women than men leave academia along the career path.

Now a colloquium, titled “Genderation BeSt – Appointment Strategies from a Gender Perspective” and scheduled to take place on November 21, 2012, at the Aachen Tivoli stadium, seeks to investigate strategies and approaches to make appointment policies and procedures at universities gender-neutral and more sensitive to gender issues.

At the event, researchers will present results from the “Genderation BeSt” project. This project, conducted by a team of scientists from TU Munich and RWTH Aachen headed by Professors Susanne Ihsen and Sabine Jeschke, investigated recruitment activities and procedures at universities under the perspective of gender equality. By undertaking this project, the project leaders seek to contribute to increasing the number of female professors at German universities.