RECOMMENDATIONS

This report has shown how factors on the individual, ins8tu8onal, cultural and na8onal level intersect and shape the leaky pipeline within the two GARCIA ins8tutes (the IMAPP and the IMR). Based on these analyses, here follow several recommenda8ons for tackling the leaky pipeline phenomenon on different levels.

• Start a conversa8on in the faculty about work-life balance and educate employees about arrangements that exist.

• Make sure employees are not ‘punished’ for taking pregnancy and parental leave but are accommodated. Ranging from dispensa8on from teaching or administra8on, research assistance, or help at home. UWV subs8tu8on funds may be used to finance this.

• Make sure people are evaluated propor8onally in case of part-8me work and parental leave. Consider the performance appraisal: taking into account explicitly all circumstances that influence the experienced work pressure and performance (e.g. research output).

• Bemer facilitate the embedding of foreign women (and men) in ins8tutes e.g. by structurally organizing and integra8ng people in research seminars, by providing them with a Dutch ‘buddy’, by communica8ng in English.

• Provide ‘hours’ for the procedure to get Teaching Qualifica8ons. Also consider restructuring these procedures, as now they are perceived as a burden and an obligatory step to gain tenure, instead of a useful tool to improve quality. • On a system and university level: enhance the ra8o PhDs – postdoc/assistant

professor posi8ons, i.e. less PhD candidates and/or more postdoc/assistant professor posi8ons.

• Enhance the (perceived) randomness of grant approvals. Slice up the big grants into more small grants, to decrease the Mamhew effect and give more early career scholars a chance to conduct their own research and stay in academia. • Postdoc contracts need to last longer for people to get work done, ar8cles

published, networks built, gevng embedded in organiza8ons, provide teaching. • Start a conversa8on on the ‘ideal academic’ to make room for more diversity in

the ‘success stories’

From WP6.1 we take the following sugges8ons:

• Educate women and men in academia (from PhD level to ins8tute directors) about the gendered context of academia.

• All academic staff: organizing a lunch mee8ng to give best prac8ces to avoid gender bias in recruitment and evalua8on.

• Workshop commimee members; staff members that frequently feature in recruitment and selec8on commimees.

• Workshop chairs of departments (leerstoelhouders); full professors that are responsible for the evalua8on of their group (vlootschouw).

• Focus on hiring women PhD candidates, par8cularly in the IMAPP departments.

• Loosen the criterion of interna8onal experience for IMAPP postdocs, and take into considera8on that it can have gendered consequences, and that interna8onal networks and collabora8ons can be obtained in many different ways.

• Create postdoc posi8ons that contain the possibility to do teaching. For example, a postdoc posi8on that has funding for three years full-8me research can be extended to a four-year contract when the postdoctoral researcher has 25% teaching du8es. The teaching 8me is paid for by the department (if the budget allows). This way the postdoc gets valuable experience in teaching and also has a longer secured posi8on.

• Develop a talent follow up system to trail talented women PhD candidates and postdocs aVer they leave, and offer them a posi8on aVer a number of years.

ICELAND

Garcia insBtuBon: University of Iceland

Authors: Thomas Brorsen Smidt, Gyða Margrét Pétursdótr, Þorgerður Einarsdótr

1. INTRODUCTION

Iceland has historically had a very high rate of women's labour market par8cipa8on, and women in Iceland also have long working hours. There is also a large educa8onal gap, with women making up the na8onal majority of university students. However, despite the high ra8o of women’s educa8on and labour market par8cipa8on, women have fewer opportuni8es in the labour market and the gender pay gap remains considerable. The Icelandic labour market is highly gender segregated, ver8cally and horizontally, with men in higher posi8ons than women; women more oVen working in the public sector such as health care, welfare and educa8on, and men more oVen in the private sector (see D3.2.) These broad societal gender regimes are arguably mirrored in the way the University of Iceland is organised across disciplines and in the gendered fabric of the organiza8on. In 2013 the student body at the University of Iceland was approximately 14.000 out of nearly 20.000 university students in total in Iceland of which 34% are men and 66% women. However, despite women’s high par8cipa8on in some parts of higher educa8on they are decidedly underrepresented in the higher professional layers of the educa8onal system that come with pres8ge, influence and a higher salary. In general, women are predominantly represented in SSH fields, which enjoy the least amount of funding, the highest teacher-to-student ra8o (i.e. bigger workload), the least amount of stature, and the fewest op8ons for a future career in academia. Oppositely, STEM fields, which are dominated by men, receive considerably more funding and enjoy a higher stature even though they amract a much lower number of students. It is in the ranking of assistant professor that distribu8ons of men and women come closest to resembling gender equality at the University of Iceland. However, if we move up the academic ladder we find that, across both SSH and STEM, men overwhelmingly occupy the higher academic posi8ons with the most stature (see D6.1.)

In other words, there is good reason to iden8fy and analyse narra8ves on career experiences, star8ng from the individual trajectories of early career academics, as this might shed some much needed light on the leaky pipeline from the postdoc to the assistant professor ranking through to the rank of full professor.

On the following pages we will go over our methodology in more detail as well as describe our sampling methods. We will then perform a transversal analysis of interviews with academics who have leV the University of Iceland at one point or another (what we also refer to as academic movers/leavers), as well as with current postdocs and assistant professors. Based on this analysis we will then provide a transversal discussion of the different interview categories. We will end this report with recommenda8ons for tackling the leaky pipeline phenomenon in our specific context.