Equality at UPWr

• Disparities in the number of women in universities. Where are they most visible?
• Where do they come from?
• There are several initiatives at UPWr that will facilitate equal treatment for everyone at the university, including the Gender Equality Plan that has been adopted

A female academic and a male academic – is there a difference in experience?

I am currently reading the autobiography of the American neuroscientist Ben Barres (1954-2017), a transgender scientist. He was born on the East Coast of the USA, in Newark. As Barbara. And as a girl he started university. He was, by the way, very talented, especially in mathematics, and graduated from really great universities, including MIT, but ended up going into neuroscience and glial cells. He was very successful, but being first a female scientist and then a male scientist, he experienced a difference in attitude between men and women – even at the best universities and research units in the United States, including Stanford and Harvard Universities. In 2006, he published an essay in Nature, 'Does gender matter', as a polemic to the view of the then president of Harvard University, who at the time argued that the reason few women were hired for tenure in the sciences and engineering under his leadership was that women were characterised by lower innate ability than men. Barres' argument against this view pointed out that there was no convincing evidence of innate differences in the cognitive abilities of the two sexes, but there was overwhelming evidence of gender bias. And to this day the effects of these biases are still visible . Changing the stereotype takes time, and the state of affairs is very well shown in the European Commission's report THE SHE. Disparities in the presence of women in science, i.e. issues directly related to gender equality, exist all the time.

Where do these differences most visible?

In decision-making bodies. Also, in the academic hierarchy, the higher up the career ladder, in terms of positions, the fewer women there are. You can also see that there are far fewer women in technical, engineering faculties, which are perceived as masculine. This is the case, for example, in the fields of renewable energy sources and waste management, agricultural and forestry technology. UPWr's report on the university's equality plan shows that women dominate in administration and non-teaching positions – more than 70 percent. In the case of academics, up to and including PhD’s, women account for about 56 percent, but in the group of professors, men account for more than 70 percent. In the area of management, however, there is parity. We have two male and two female pro-rectors in such positions. We owe this parity to the current rector, Prof. Jarosław Bosy. When the statute of the university was being drafted, he also made sure that a reference to the need to guarantee women's rights and equalise gender differences was included in the preamble.

Is the difference in the number of highest level of scientific titles a generational issue?

I think it is. In veterinary medicine, i.e. in my own degree, it is well noticeable, although there are still more men among the titular professors. However, it is worth recalling that when I started studying at this faculty, there was a de facto numerus clausus – fewer women were admitted. Only about 20 percent.

Was it thought that the veterinary profession was too difficult?

It was simply thought to be a male profession and this was very much evident in this gender disparity. We girls obviously studied very well, we had a lot of nice colleagues, but it doesn't change the fact that we were grossly underrepresented because that was the strategy in the department and the assessment of the suitability of women in the profession. Now that has changed, and it's changed to the point where at veterinary medicine 70 percent of students are women. So inevitably there will also be a change in the group of titular professors – it will be driven by the number of women who stay at the university thinking about an academic career. Because those who stay at assistant and assistant professor level already make up 50 percent of the staff. More and more women will apply to become professors, and there will be a real change here, but it will come from statistics, not from a change in the mentality and perception of women... Because here the biggest problem is stereotypical thinking about the role of women, and this is really very difficult.

Why?

Women very often give up on a career in science because of the prevailing stereotype and the entrenched sense of duty assigned to the role. A woman who is a scientist, living in such a stereotype, has a dilemma all the time – whether she should be a wife and mother or pursue a career, as if these two aspects are mutually exclusive. And it's also a matter of work-life balance, an agreement with your partner that a woman's work is also important and that's perfectly natural.

Such dilemmas do not exist for men – in their case, a career at the expense of the family was until recently considered normal.

Exactly.

In Afghanistan, the Taliban have deprived girls and women of the opportunity to receive an education, and in Iran, schoolgirls are being poisoned in schools and universities with some substance of unknown origin, which is quite commonly regarded as punishment for taking part in protests against the restrictions and limitations of the Islamic republic.

We forget, or don’t know, that the first woman to receive a doctorate in Wrocław did so in 1900. That was only 123 years ago. This reluctance to educate girls and women, to have them acquire knowledge and develop stems from a deeply rooted patriarchal model of the human race. And it is also primarily a matter of mentality, and changing it requires a lot of effort and determination on the part of women. In Europe and the United States, we had suffragettes who were outraged, locked up in prisons, threatened. Any woman who broke the stereotype was suspect. Marie Curie-Skłodowska was the victim of a massive anti-Semitic media attack, which is related to other prejudices. But it was not only in the world of science that women had to carve out their own rights and place. Take Coco Chanel, for example, a figure from the fashion world - she too showed that it was possible to think differently. So it's really first and foremost a question of going beyond stereotypical frameworks and limitations. And that takes time, great determination and support. There are signals of support coming from Europe, which is more aware, and from all over the Western world, for women who are bravely fighting for their rights. After all, no one should be punished for wanting to learn.

You mentioned the association of different professions as typically male and typically female.

We have very many such examples. The education system from an early age means that women themselves often do not make choices that go against the stereotype in which they grow up. In this book, which I mentioned at the beginning, this is particularly well described. This neurologist was genetically male, phenotypically partly female, and his parents, unaware of this, pushed him into the stereotype of what was expected of a girl. He wasn't allowed to play with boys, and when he came to visit one of his friends, with whom they had a great time, at one point this boy's parents said they didn't want him to visit them, because they were already in their teens and the adults anticipated the kind of relationship that might result.... This division between girls and boys still determines the way we educate, without giving the chance to shape their interests without looking at what is appropriate or not for either boys or girls. We are imprinting children, students, then women and men with systems of behaviour that are divisive, when there are many areas that can and should be shared.

 We have more female students, is this in any way visible in terms of role division, career paths?

It seems to me that this is an opposite problem – when we look at the data on the number of students, the majors they choose, it is clear that we actually have more girls. And this mainly means that our studies, perhaps already at the stage of their presentation, are not attractive to boys. This may also be due to the fact that in the courses we offer, the pass rate for the A-level is higher for women, which means that they enter these courses more easily, because, after all, there are no more entrance exams, only the results of the A-levels are decisive for admission. As a university, we should look at this issue, analyse it and try to encourage more men to study with us, so as not to perpetuate these stereotypes, this time in reverse.

Does the higher number of female students affect the functioning of the university in any way? I mean non-teaching issues, e.g. pink boxes, baby changing facilities in selected areas, etc.

It does not, unfortunately. We should be building a women-friendly environment, but the thing is that if they are not responsible for the decision-making, they cannot articulate their needs. We don't have to deal at all with ill-will, perpetuated stereotypes, but when they're not there, there's no one to say that this changing table in the dormitory is needed and as a result no one knows about it. I once read about a situation like this, where in a large corporation one of the employees was pregnant. The company had a large car park, she happened to park far away from the entrance and when she was already highly pregnant, it was difficult to get to the building. She told the decision-making board about this out loud. The result was that several parking spaces at the entrance were allocated to pregnant women from this corporation. And here I must emphasise that we have several initiatives that should, in time, facilitate the equal treatment of all people at the university, including the Gender Equality Plan that has been adopted, a functioning rectoral anti-discrimination committee, an appointed ombudsman for preventing irregularities and implementing corrective action. In the EU GREEN project that has just started, there are planned activities that will facilitate us to achieve some of the goals that are indicated in the Gender Equality Plan. In the GEP we have the areas of action indicated, we know what we should do and it only remains for us to specify the ways of implementation. In EU GREEN, especially in working area WP7 'Accessibility-Diversity-Inclusion', but also in other areas, there is a strong emphasis on actions to reduce gender disparities, including, for example, ensuring gender balance in competition juries evaluating project applications, councils and other decision-making bodies.

Why is the presence of women in such evaluation bodies important?

Because we know from many analyses that, for example, women and men write project applications differently and those written by female scientists are evaluated less favourably by scientists. And no amount of anonymisation will help. This is why decision-making bodies should take parity into account. This is also stated in the recommendations related to the awarding of the HR logo by the European Commission. Another objective we want to achieve with the EU GREEN is to increase the number of women in engineering studies, stereotypically associated with men. This has been strongly emphasised at the level of the consortium as a whole and is a guideline, a direction for us. There are nine universities involved in the consortium. We want to look at how they are implementing the GEP. Such a benchmark will allow us to choose the best practices, the most effective solutions. But to reiterate, systemic change is closely linked to mental change. Without this, we will not understand that gender equality is an opportunity for everyone - both women and men.

kbk

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