 And I will introduce the next speaker, who is Inge Hayes. She's a lecturer and maritah of the University of Copenhagen, and she's also board member at the Association of Gender Research and the Danish Women's Council. She graduated as candidate scientist in statistics in 1966. And afterwards, she became associate professor at the Department of Theorical Statistics at the University of Copenhagen. In 2007, she became senior researcher at Oros University. We have invited her here today because of her long work in gender issues related. So she participated from 1996 to 2002 in the research project Gender Various in the Academic Organization. She's been chairperson of the board of Queenfort, the Danish Center for the Study and Work with Issues Related to Gender, Equality and Diversity, for eight years. Moreover, she's also been member of the Board of Scientific Advisors at the European Union Project Extractional Transformation to Achieve Gender Equality in Science. The title of her talk today is, What Does the Association for Gender Research and Other External Actors Do to Promote Gender Equality at Universities? So please, thank me. Join me to welcome her. Thank you. I thank the arrangement committee for inviting me to this most interesting conference. And I think that to me it has pointed out some new things about working at the gender in the university. So I'm very grateful for your idea of inviting somebody from the outside to come here. So in my abstract, I promised to cover three points. And one would be, what are the links between the gender research and gender equality work at universities? The other is the contribution of external actors to gender equality work at universities. And then, how can we work? How can this work be enhanced and contribute to the counteracting of the cultural and structural conditions that impact women's careers in the academic system? This is far too much to cover in half an hour. So I'll skip the first point and go directly to the next one. I think we're going to take a few more minutes into talk. In the talk, we're going to move on. So I'll take a detour and say that talk about civil society. And what do I mean by civil society in the universities? I mean the sort of ordinary lecturers, professors, students, and the researchers that are not in any committees or the governing bodies or whatever. And my point is that I think that civil society should have a much greater say in any kind of recruitment affairs. So I just had to learn the techniques here. It disappeared, yes. Can you manage? So I'll just, thank you. And let's use that. Thank you. At present, when we talk about civil society, I will say that at present there's a growing recognition of the fact that civil society in many areas can accomplish what government agencies cannot. And we encounter more and more instances of cooperation between government agencies and NGO. This is a worldwide trend, and it has already given some excellent results. There's also an awareness of the fact that establishing and maintaining robust civil society organizations in many cases is dependent on financial and organizational support if you see sort of in general, in Denmark, in other places, there's a lot of efforts going on on how can governments, how can municipalities support civil society without sort of taking the civil out of it? How can they keep the good things and at the same time helping civil society to take part? And I guess it would be the same with the university. How can universities support civil society in, for instance, recruitment in that affairs? So my contention is that in academia, civil society in the form of ordinary researchers, teachers, and students can promote equality in ways that is not open to research councils and governing bodies. And when I heard the talk, I said, I am in a way also civil society. I am a statistician and I am a gender researcher. And I want to say some things. But I am all speaking time here, so I didn't. What I can do here is talk about external access. I'll point to you, what kind of external access do we have in Denmark if you wanted to talk about research and gender equality? But I put a top, it's for you, to correspondence in Denmark, that is my sort of my own association. But my own association and what can we do? What have we done? What are we? And you'll see that the members is mainly university lecturers, students, and also candidates working with gender-related topics. And the main interest is, of course, to promote gender research. But gender equality at universities has been a recurring theme for their association in the last 30 years. So a lot of work has been going on on gender equality. Then we have it's in Copenhagen, something called Coordination for Crimesforcing. It is an inter-faculty unit at the University of Copenhagen. And interesting, I think, this coordination started out as a national committee for gender research and recruitment of women. So it was, I hope, a thing for all universities, for everyone, this coordination. But it was laser downsized and included as an interdisciplinary unit in the University of Copenhagen because the research council didn't want to spend money and things like that. Historically, this coordination had a special responsibility for promoting gender research in science and engineering because it was recognized that there was some kind of problem about recruiting women in those fields. But this has ceased since it really doesn't exist any longer as a national priority. It is still the main link between the European Union and the national academics when it comes to gender and research. And this coordination and training have a longstanding, what I would say, not very fruitful collaboration trying to strengthen the gender dimension in the national research plans. Kvinfo is the next association I would point to. And this is a Knowledge and Development Center for Gender, Gender Equality and Diversity. Its mission is on a knowledge-informed basis to qualify, debate, and promote gender equality in a current context through dissemination partnerships and innovative projects, nationally and internationally. Unfortunately, Kvinfo's library, that was sort of the heart of the whole thing, was recently merged with the Royal Library, meaning that it was taken over by the Royal Libraries. And most of the research and dissemination tasks related to the library were abandoned. So Kvinfo has sort of, it doesn't have that much outgoing activities as it used to be. But I'd point to Kvinfo that published the Danish Female Biographical Dictionary, and it also maintains a database on female experts. The next thing is a twin award in Denmark, the Danish Council of Women. And it is associated with the European Women's Lobby. It's an umbrella organization for more than 40 women's organizations, comprising women's committees from labor union, political parties, migrant women, women in music, girl scouts, et cetera. So it's very, very diverse. Also, students organizations and university women are represented in the Danish Council of Women. The aim is to promote gender equality. And Kvinfo is a regular partner in government hearings. And Kvinfo is also a member of the European Women's Lobby. I'll say that when I point to this hearing that we are hearing and sort of talking to government, talking to government agencies, of course, this is something that could be a spokesperson also for some of the problems we have at universities. That's another way of getting to the authorities. Then we have the labor union for academics. And I put up a lot of letters here, but this probably doesn't say very much. But I can see we have representatives from 200 labor unions here today, because they want to sort of follow what is going on here. They all have active equality committees with activities targeting, among other things, gender equality at the universities. They have close relationships with women from other parts of the labor movement through women and through what's called mainstream environment. Meaning that there is actually a rather good connection among the women in the labor union and much better than the men. So that's a way of sort of hitting and having access to the broader labor union movement. It is through the women in the labor union, I should say. I'm always through with this. So we have Institute for Men's Corridor, which is a Danish Institute for Human Rights. And it comprises the national equal treatment units. So they have sort of gotten this task from the government. Part of the assignment for the equal treatment unit is research and development. And they have worked intensively with women in leadership and equal pay. And I think that some of the things that they have made there could be of interest for the universities. Then finally, I have the Nordic Council and the Nordic Research Organizations. And gender equality is part of the agenda for the Nordic Council of Ministers. And this is home for Nick, the Nordic Gender Institute and Norforsk, comprising a big Nordic project in gender research. It is a project gender and Nordic research innovation area. But this is a project that has no participation because the Danish government did not get money for the enterprise. So this is a Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish, Icelandic enterprise. And it is some two, I think, centers of excellence. One in a big research project. And we are looking very much forward to see what the results will be. So these are some of the external access. And I think that it would be interesting for universities and for the external access to sort of cooperate into a much greater extent than we have seen till now. And then a very important thing is arenas for communication. We'll be talking about culture. And I guess that this is one of the things that we are not very good at. We might have, maybe we can make statistics because we have some great registers, so we can make a lot of statistics. But what do we know about culture? And I think that we have some kind of speaking together, speaking to each other. But it's not something that you can just sit down in a committee meeting and then say, oh, culture, that is this. And then we do this. So it's my view that one of the impediments for sustained work on gender equality, it is a lack of suitable arenas for communication, both on a national and on an institutional level. There is a need for exchange of knowledge, ideas, views, and experiences, and the present journals or whatever we have here can, for various reasons, not meet that need. What do we have? I have listed five arenas for communication, of which the two are dead. So I have, in reality, listed three arenas for communication. And one is the Journal of Women, Gender, and Research that's published by Coordination for Conforcing. But it is primarily dedicated to peer-reviewed research papers. And the production time is anyway so long that no meaningful communication relating to current issues can take place. So this is not a place where you will sort of see, we have this and that experience. Can you help me with this or that? FIXO is a new, net-based journal on gender, body, and culture. It is independent. It is clinical and research-based, but not peer-reviewed. It is based on research. And it's not tuned to an ongoing discussion of gender equality in universities because the aim is something else. Then we have Nick Newsletter. It is an Norwegian or Nordic newsletter. But it's not open for exchange of opinions. And then, we could say, Kringford's net-based web magazine was a place for discussion of current problems. But as I said, it ceased last year due to downsizing of Kringford. The same happened to Nick News that was restructured or dropped, ceased when Nick was restructured. And even if some efforts have been made to start ongoing discussions on web pages or page Facebook pages belonging to women's organizations, none have been successful. And neither the Research Council nor any of universities have managed to initiate and maintain a broad discussion. Then we look at what we call recurrent, where we have termed recurrent activities. This is what are the external actors doing, sort of, all the time to help gender equality and also gender equality at universities. And the first I would mention, next slide. It is a place where every meeting three to four newly finished PhD or master's students, they present gender-relevant results from their thesis. This takes place four times a year with an audience of 8,800 persons, which many are graduate students. What is the benefit of this? Well, the presenters get value out of the academic experience and the audience gets the possibility to discuss the tricks of the trade with the presenters. Wexler is a joint venture between for Inning for Kringford and Kringford. And I will say that there has been one session of Wexler in August, and we hope to sort of have more sections. It was at Kringford, and we hope to do that again. The next thing is Ors Konferanzen, the annual conference on gender research. And it switches between the universities and has over the years hosted many presentations and discussions of gender equality in academia. I can not list all of them because this has happened for 30 years, so a lot of things have been discussed. Ors Konferanzen is also an arena where younger gender researchers have the opportunity of giving presentations and arranging workshops to gain academic credits. That's not so easy if you are in gender research as in many other areas. Often the hosting universities give sizeable contributions by paying for international guests and so on and so forth. Tuck's Talk Town is a women's movement, a festival where everybody is sort of invited, but gender research organization has the opportunity to disseminate results from gender research, show people what is gender research to create interest in the subject. And finally, I would name it a cracker prison that is a yearly prize for outstanding gender-related publication. And it was founded by a private donation some 15 years ago. And I would say it gives much-needed publicity to gender research because, I mean, lots of newspapers are saying this person got this prize and for this and that. So I think all this sort of helps to promote gender research. Finally, it has been created a gender certificate aimed at students from other disciplines. It was developed by Coordination for Goodness Forcing and it is kind of a joint venture by gender researchers from various disciplines. It is an opportunity to get a recognition of gender competencies as a form of qualification, which is, in my view, very important because if you want to have somebody working in the university administration or whatever, you say gender competencies are never asked for and you cannot, you have to sort of say, we think maybe they have it because, I mean, they have a gender certificate and they have competencies or whatever and the thing. But this is a way of sort of saying that some people, this is a knowledge thing, it's not a feeling, it's not a feeling, equality is something. It is a knowledge thing, it's the brain and not the heart that you think equality. Then I would go to, but this is sort of getting started and now I will go to the topics of importance for gender equality at universities addressed by external actors. So I try to say what is important here if you want to have gender equality at universities, what topics are addressed by external actors and maybe not by the university, even if it is important. So the first thing I would take here is, I'm not doing this very well, I think. The first thing I'll take here is gender segregation, saying that Denmark has a high degree of gender segregation, both in education and in the labor market. And this includes academia, I mean, we have a very gender segregated academia and we have some recent discussions with some strange philosophers that are trying to explain why the Scandinavian countries are so gender segregated, but I've not started that discussion. A pertinent question here is whether this gender segregation in education and labor market is a persistent trend. And my opinion is that it is a persistent trend, it's not something that will just pass. But at present, anyway, at present we see few times of lessening of segregation and for the universities, a high degree of future gender segregation is already visible in the school system. As a comment to the last lecture, I would say that we can see in school, we know how the gender distribution of the universities will be 20, 30 years from now because the students, they are already in school so we know what they prefer, we know what they do and it is just wishful thinking that this is not going to be the case for the next 20, 30 years. We will have a gender segregated academia. I'll say hence the possibility of recruiting more women to the universities is very much dependent on the distribution of positions and resources. Since men and women now and in the foreseeable future will go there in separate ways in the academic system. So what I suggest here is that universities and research organizations take up gender budgeting. This is something that is being done, especially in Sweden, but it is sort of having, thinking about what gender consequences do the various decisions in this budget in this have. And gender budgeting is actually a part of the official mainstream strategy that Denmark has sort of endorsed. And the university, I think the university system could get valuable insights if it adopted gender budgeting as an integral part of its planning. And I also think that when you make, well, this can be a bit. For many of the external actors that I have listed here, equal pay and equal opportunities in employment and promotion are a main concern. And they are continually, albeit not very successfully, developing methods to document and combat gender inequalities. For instance, planning for more women in leadership where certain features might be of interest for the university. The same could be said of the motherhood penalty that is rampant also in universities. The Research Council-Lated Study of Recruitment shows that, for instance, that women with children are especially vulnerable, especially vulnerable group. This is a university and this is also in society in general. But how do you combat that? This, how do you document this? It is some places, some people, some organizations are much better equipped to do this than the universities are. And I think universities could learn a lot if they sort of cooperate with other organizations in Denmark. Now, if you take me too, and its documentation are the pervasive culture of sexual harassment in any society and in the universities. And it has taken everybody, including universities, with surprise. Today it's evident that sexual harassment has had a detrimental effect on the career of many young women, even making them leave their jobs or their fields altogether. I am sure that this has also happened at the universities. But it has never once appeared in research report on women in the university system. So this has worked for a long time. But don't tell me that we didn't know. I mean, I know, I mean, I've been in university for many years and I knew and I did the new and I didn't know because we didn't talk about it. We didn't put it under the rug, as we say in Denmark. But this has definitely had an impact on the career system of the career chances, the career tracks of women. But it has never been taken into account when we sort of discuss what it is that keeps women from advancing in the university system. And I see Orbus hasn't sort of reached that point either. But yeah, so this is just to say that there could be really many things coming from the outside that would be worth taking into account at universities. But so what you have to do is you have to find out how do we get canals into that kind of knowledge so that it can be part of the strategy in the university. I could say that gender differences, if you take something like temporary employment and the precarious, it has been discussed when the Danish Research Council had just had a rather big record on temporary employment and shown, for instance, that women with children are sort of the most vulnerable group in this, if it comes to employment and if it comes to getting tenured employment. But I think that this has to be seen in a rather in a bigger context because if you are interested in labor market, I mean precarious working conditions, the precarious as it's something called is being studied extensively and we are trying out what does it mean, what will it mean for women and what will it mean for men? Will it be the same, women and men be sort of hit by the precarious in the same way? Or will some women profit more from this kind of organization of work than many do? We don't know. But I think that it would be interesting for universities to have this temporary employment discussion embedded in a bigger labor market discussion taken into account, precarious, general precarious working conditions, digitalization and also the gig economy. What will this mean for our graduates? What will this mean for researchers when we have that kind of economy and not the kind of economy where we are sort of employed for life or is the gig economy already here when you look at researchers? I think that in some areas we have it is here, it's not common, it is here. And it would be interesting if you talk about women, quality in universities to see how does these changing working conditions influence men and influence women. I'll point to something like work balance and of course we have some specific problems at the universities. One could take a general problem saying, what does parental mandatory, parental leave for fathers mean at the universities? I mean, I can point to some. I can point to one consequence is that actually very many, rather many men at the universities take parental leave. And what does it do? I mean, parental leave is sort of setting women back in their career. Parental leave is also setting men back, maybe not compared to women, but what we have here in this international world, we have a lot of places where there is a clear division of labor between the husband and the wife, and she is using all her time to give him opportunity to qualify, meaning that we have something like mandatory parental leave. It will not only be an disadvantage for women, but it will also be a disadvantage for the Danish men that are actually trying to have some kind of equal relationships in their everyday life. I think we should think about it here at the universities. And we should also think about the internationalization. A lot of discussions with young women tell the university also that internationalization is a big problem. How can you sort of move your family? So if I saw this point number five saying that, long time stay at top international organizations or institute, I said this is not for women, it is to give them a second chance. Also, what I would have expected from a university is to say, how can we give our students the same experience with how work is being done in other countries, working with other persons from other countries, from other areas. Isn't there a way of doing it that doesn't require long extended stays in a foreign country? I think that I worked at the debut part of August University. And there was one of the PhD students. She studied in Oslo, and she had the abrasion. And in the half of the weeks, children was with her husband, and then she was in Oslo. And then when she should have the children, she came back to Copenhagen, and she had a wonderful stay. And it was very interesting for her to do it in that way. One could think of it. Also, thinking should be move people here instead of moving our old persons out. I think that it is not, if you come outside the university, people will question this, how wonderful is it with this internationalization? And I would say that we have a government that has just sort of made it very difficult to stay for a long period in a foreign country if it is outside the EU, because you will use your social benefits. And maybe a person that's going out doesn't use it, but if there's a company, wife or husband, she will use it. So I think you should think this point over when you have, if the government gets through with this. Yes. I'm just trying to pick something out here and say, these are topics, examples of topics that are important for gender equality at the universities, but not being addressed by the universities, but being addressed by external actors. And maybe everybody would benefit to have some kind of cooperation between external actors and the university when you discuss things like that. So I could go much bigger and say, what should we discuss? We should discuss the whole sustainability development. Yes, I think sustainability development has a gender part in that should be discussed. The future of work, what's actually the future of work? And that must be of interest for especially young people at the university that is to be here for 40 years, 50 years, and what is the future of work? What kind of university will you have in the future? Just take, for instance, the Lundiglasion naming the great social challenges in the future. And if you see that, it is so interesting because all the great social challenges, but a lot of the great social challenges that they list is actually women's jobs, women's areas in research. I haven't kept the time, but I'm sure that if this, I'd be talking longer than I talk. You have five more minutes. OK, fine. So then I'll have five more minutes to answer the question. It says, what can be done? This was actually what the... So what can be done to promote equality at universities? And how can external and internal access sort of the process and continue to conduct in the cultural and structural conditions that impact women's careers in the academic system? And I think a number of possibilities can be pointed out. Strangely, I have more ideas for the internal actors, for the internal actors, but maybe that's not so strange. But I want to point out one thing that you can do anything about here, is that the external actors are impeded by shrinking resources. Very many things that used to be done is not being done anymore. I'll give you some examples on journals, ceasing on things that could not be done because of lack of manpower or women power. But this is not something that we can remedy here. But what I would suggest the external actors, as I include myself, it is a greater focus on communication between universities and external actors. And don't wait till they ask you, and you have to sort of come and say, can we do this, can we do that? And that one should seize on the existing opportunities to cooperate with the university system. And this could also be some talk to the deeper unions here. Maybe you should also invite the universities to come and have discussions because they think it could be fruitful for both parties. For the university and research councils, what I'm called the university system, what I suggest is not very big, but still. I suggest that you create national university equality bodies as partners for civil society. They have that in Norway, they have that in Sweden. We don't have that in Denmark. And that is actually, I mean, if you want communication, you should say, who should I talk to? So I think it would be a very good idea to have a national university equality body, not only as partners for civil society, but also working in the university. I would suggest that you create arenas for critical discussion on quality of relevant topics and also dissemination of results. I mean, you have a plan here for Orkhus University. Who maybe somebody at Orkhus University knows that plan. But outside the university, who knows it? Maybe the deans, maybe the research councils, but not the general women or men in other universities. I think that there should be a much bigger space for sort of a talk of discussions and dissemination of results and ideas. I'm saying to universities that they should give credit for voluntary work on gender equality. 30 years ago, there was actually a civic society in universities when we talked about gender equality. This was sort of, I would say, ossified, but it was absorbed and being changed into gender equality committees or whatever, and then it disappeared. Maybe not because there was a gender equality committee, but because working conditions at the universities are very hard these days. And you cannot sort of use the time for something that does not give you an article that you can put in this June or whatever you have, pure whatever you have at the university. So it is the same for departments and other bodies. So I would think that the university should give credit for voluntary work on gender equality. Departments and other university bodies should be rewarded by the amount and quality of work with civil society and should be there duty-sorted people to speak to, start it up, but then they should be rewarded and you sort of say, yes, this is a good thing to do. Also, I think that universities, maybe I've said this, universities and research councils enter into serious dialogue and cooperation with labor unions and women's organizations regarding topics like equal pay, sexual harassment, and precarious working conditions that I think would be beneficial for all parties. I was to a meeting yesterday in a labor union and they were talking about how come that working together is actually so smooth in Denmark. We were talking about the Danish model. And it turned out that research showed that what was being put is being pointed out as the most valuable part in the labor relationship in Denmark was that the bosses were willing to listen to the people on the floor. And it was sort of all over and it was pointed out in international places and so on that this is probably one of the strengths of the Danish model is that you have an active dialogue that the leaders were prepared to listen to the people. So what I would say, Dr. Singh, here is that external actors have value of knowledge so listen. Use in order to advance gender violence of immigrants. We'll take two questions because of our technical constraints. Yes, hi. Rather than a question, it's a comment. Thank you so much for raising the issue of internationalization with regard to gender equality because I think that by trying to address an issue, so making the university more international, we might be maybe creating another problem which is widening the gender gap. And especially as you mentioned, now with the current political situation, the political climate, we as representatives are going to Alka that's a representation of HB students here. We raised this concern to the management because I think that there needs to be some considerations especially in the light of the new recruitment norms. So I just wanted to thank you for raising this issue that I really think that needs to be taken care of in the future. Thank you for this question. So thank you for the very nice talk. I was wondering what's your opinion about gender equity versus gender equality? I mean as far as gender equity implies tools that actually try to give a bit more advantage to those that are disadvantaged at the beginning in order to come to a certain point. Gender equality would be okay, let's make the numbers equal without trying to actually implement these tools. Yes, gender equality is not one thing. I mean here we saw that gender equality was 40% between 40% and 60% women everywhere at all, levels at all departments. And I would say that this is not my definition of gender equality. I think gender equality could also be defined in the sense that women and men have for instance the same possibility of getting a promotion. So if you start out with 10% women among the IT students, you should not have as a goal that you should have 50% women among the professors. No, you should have the goal that the percentage of women in one layer reflects the percentage of women at the level where they recruited from. That is another way of defining equality. And I think that if you have a gender segregated university and are absolutely convinced that we will go on having a gender segregated university, you have to sort of think gender equality differently. You cannot say in all institutes, whether you say in all areas, yes, but not in all areas. Some areas will be women dominated and you are more women professors. But you should have more women professors. The problem today is you don't, but you have more men in there, you have more male professors. So there could be another way of defining equality. And that would not have the consequences that you talk about here. But of course, the definition of equality, saying that we should try and get between 40 and 60% women at the professor level and you have a very skewed recruitment base, then what you say there can happen if you want to sort of succeed on one level you will sort of fail and fail on another. That is really the issue that the PhD level is 50% and then as the positions become more prestigious and more stable and more malicious, then there's fewer and fewer and fewer and fewer women. So I think that that is really the problem. Thank you for raising that question and that's a fantastic answer. We really need to get that in that way. We are going to finish the first part of our program. I'll ask the three presenters please to join us in the front for an applause.