Page - 27 - in Critical Issues in Science, Technology and Society Studies - Conference Proceedings of the 17th STS Conference Graz 2018

Hidden discrimination in academia. Mentoring as an Empowerment Strategy for Female Researchers in Medicine. VERVOORTS, Anja, MASETKINA, Ekaterina, GÜNDOGDU, Selma, MOMMERTZ, Michelle Equal Opportunity Office, Heinrich-Heine-University Düsseldorf, Germany Abstract This article examines the (equal) opportunities for female researchers in the Faculty of Medicine at a German university, the hidden obstacles in pursuing individual careers in academia, the factors preventing females from reaching leading positions as well mentoring as an instrument favoring the predictability, security and stability of the academic career. The authors performed several quantitative studies on the working conditions as well as a survey on mentoring effects for female researchers working at the Medical Faculty. The main target group includes female researchers at the postdoctoral phase of academic qualification. 1. Introduction: Are there signs of gender discrimination in academia? Increasingly precarious working conditions are considered to be a common phenomenon among academics of both genders1 at universities in Germany. Nevertheless Gender equality plans demonstrate the underrepresentation of women at higher stages of their academic careers. Especially, it refers to the field of medicine, where the proportion of women resembles a pyramid – the higher the academic qualification level is the fewer females are represented. While the majority of medicine students (64,5%) as well as doctorate researchers (66,7%) is female, only few female researchers manage to reach the top of the pyramid. The percentage of female professors is 21,2 % for the W2 positions and only 17,0 % for the highest W3 positions2. In order to prevent the structural discrimination of female researchers and increase the proportion of women at universities, the position of women representatives, renamed later on into the position of equal opportunities commissioners was introduced all over Germany at the beginning of the 1990s [2]. One of the tools to promote equal opportunities in academia is considered to be a formal mentoring program for female researchers. The reasons of the underrepresentation of women in higher positions in academia can vary in every individual case, but we can suppose a certain latent discrimination of the female gender in the educational system of Germany. In this article we analyze the working conditions of female researchers at the Medical Faculty. Our special interest lies on the target group of employees between two qualification stages – after the PhD degree and before the habilitation. We investigate, which personal and professional key skill female researchers gain through mentoring and conclude, how helpful the female-oriented program are in order to if not to reach gender balance than at least to raise awareness of existing gender imbalance within the scientific community. 1 In this article we analyse the variable “gender” by comparing the conditions for male and female researchers. Because of unavailability of data, the third gender is currently not the subject of our analysis. 2 Internal statistics of Heinrich-Heine-University Dusseldorf, 2016. 27