University of Zurich Has 30 Percent Female Professors for the First Time

(CONNECT) At the end of last year, 30.3 percent of all professorships at UZH were held by women. "This is the highest figure in the history of UZH," Karin Gilland Lutz is quoted as saying in a statement from the university. She works there as Head of the Equality, Diversity, Inclusion department.

According to the latest gender equality monitoring, UZH owes this record largely to its assistant professorships, 50 percent of which are held by women. Around half of these were employed with tenure track. This means that there is a prospect of a permanent position at the end of the temporary assistant professorship. With such a long-term perspective, "it will hopefully remain attractive for them to stay at UZH and not follow a call from another university," says the Equal Opportunities Officer.

"We are speculating that the lock-in effect, which sometimes works against us when appointing established professors, can work to our advantage with female assistant professors and ultimately help to sustainably increase the proportion of female professors at UZH." For more established personalities, the demands of their male partners for a good position often proved to be an obstacle. They are often higher than with female partners.

This may be one of the reasons why a woman ranked first in the application process does not accept the call to UZH. The gender equality monitoring data has shown that UZH has a higher proportion of women among the first-placed candidates than among those actually appointed. "UZH is clearly losing potential here," says Gilland Lutz. In addition to generating a higher number of competitive applications from female academics, this is a lever that UZH will probably continue to use in the future. ce/mm