 We're ready now for the next speaker. Please, we will have Ramya introduce the speaker. My name is Ramya, and I'm an assistant professor at the Department of Biomedicine. And it is my pleasure to introduce to you today Karin K. Matzin. She is the head of secretariat for the Danish Council of Research and Innovation Policy. And she's been there since 2007 and has been instrumental in shaping national research policies. It's also called the DFIR. Karin finished her master's in political science at the University of Copenhagen. She also has a degree in international relations from the University of Sheffield. So today, she will talk to us about why it's difficult to attain a gender balance in the context of research. So please join me in welcoming Karin K. Matzin. Thank you very much. It's been a pleasure. And I've really been looking forward to this. It's so nice to see a lot of people being interested in this topic. And of course, you are. But still, it's a topic which seems to be neglected once in a while. So I'm very happy to be here. So as was said, can you hear me? Fine. Can you hear her in the back panel, too? So you want me to take this one from here? Yes. This is the one I'm going to test, the number two here. The one I'm going to test, actually. This one over here. And then you can take this one over here. Maybe you just want to have it back from here. Yes, like this. And then I'll be here. Yes, so. I'm going to give it a try. Can you hear me now? Is it better? Yes. Super. So I can also go a little further back. It's much better. And then I have to start over with my hair here. Yes. So I'm Secretary of the Danish Research and Innovation Policy Council. What did I say? You were English. Sorry. Yes, I swear to you. Sorry. Thanks. So I'm Head of Secretariat for the Danish Council for Research and Innovation Policy. And this council has basically been existing since 1995 or something like that. No, longer. And the council provides research and innovation policy advice to the Danish Minister for Higher Education and the Danish Parliament. So the council doesn't have any money. It provides evidence-based policy advice. And the council are the nine wonderful people. And one of them, the tall man in the middle, you may know. He's from this university, St. Kiding. And the others are also very, very nice people. So they come from industry and they come from academia, different universities, different experiences. And the scope is that if these nine people can come to agree upon something, it might be what they're listening to. So that's what we do in the Secretariat. We try to support them and to come up with policy advice and research and innovation policy that is interesting to listen to. The council can provide policy advice on their own initiative and they can also be requested to do that from a minister or from parliament and also from others. So what I would like to talk to you about today is basically two, well, one major project we are doing right now which is called Career Path. And I will show you a lot of numbers afterwards. But first, I wanted just to show you very shortly that in 2015, the previous Minister of Science and Higher Education, Sophie Castan-Nirisen, asked the council to see, could you actually say something about if you do initiatives to promote women in science, do they actually help? And could you look at internationally if this actually occurs? Because there was a major discussion at that time of a program called UDON that some of you with a dangerous background might have heard about it, that a special program to promote women in science. So she wanted to have some sort of evidence if this actually worked. And the council was working on this for about half a year and had a consultancy group to conduct interviews with policymakers and researchers and so on in four different countries. And I'll come back to that in a short while. But just to say that that was a specific project we were doing towards women in science. But firstly, the key findings from this project to look at international experiences with programs, this is from the consultant's bureau, Oxford Research, they concluded that it actually works. When you do things, it works. And they also concluded that if you put political pressure and a lot of interest to the issue of getting more women into science or research, there actually comes more women into science and research. And it might seem a bit naive, but it's actually quite important. And they could see that they looked at Finland where there's been a lot of issues to focus on more women in science for very many years. They could see previously 15, 20 years ago with a lot of political pressure to get more women into research. The number of women in research was really increasing. And eventually they thought, well, we're doing well. We don't need to have focus on that anymore. And then it stagnated. Nothing else happened. When the political issue is not on the agenda anymore, it slows up. The other thing was in Austria and Switzerland, which the council assumed would be very backwards. They weren't. They were very progressive. They had a lot of initiatives going. And you could really see from a slow starting point there was a major increase in all levels in research and science for women. And they could also see that the Netherlands that have not had political focus on this issue, institutional but no political focus, nothing really happened. That's a very, very slow development. So the council concluded, if you do things, it helps. And they were quite happy about this. What happened then was that the council normally goes to the minister and delivers a report and say, now we have done this and we want to give you this piece of advice. And in the meantime, the minister had changed. And at that time it was Espenlunde Larsen. And he very clearly stated, thank you very much for the work. It will not be read. So it was not that much came out of it. But I still think it's a quite interesting piece of work if you come around our website and want to see it. So what I basically wanted to talk with you about today was the new project, Career Path. And as I said before, I will give you a lot of data. And most of the data we have been taking from, when I say we, it's the Council of Research and Innovation Policy. And a lot of the data we are relying on is already made public. You could find it everywhere. The data series are not compatible. Some of the data is a bit older because it's impossible to get new data. Well, at least it has been very difficult for us. And so you can't really compare all this data you're going to see now. So I just wanted to draw up the picture. And many of you already know this, the CISIS diagram which was developed in the European Commission years ago to show if you actually count on all levels the percentage of women in research. You could see the CISIS, they call it, that in Europe, more women start in university. More women complete their master program. When they start PhD, they're about even. And then there's a slow, small division for a long time. And then when you come to the real positions, so to speak, as associate professor and full professor, you will see the division starts and you will end up with a more or less 20, 80% difference. So what you have here in August University is exactly as what is happening in the rest of Europe. And what was very interesting, I was actually a member of the so-called Helsinki Group before I started in the Council in the 90s. And the Helsinki Group was an expert group providing advice to the European Commission on women in science. And for the first time, we were actually gathering from different countries. And we all thought it was a specific national problem. And we all had our own explanations of why this was the case. So from Denmark, we were always used to saying, it's not a problem. You could see the women are coming. You can see there are far more women on the master level and also on the PhD level. It's just a matter of time they will be there. And in Germany, we're always saying, it's because of the children. If we would only have kindergarten at the university, they would all be there. And so all different countries had their own explanations. And just to show these figures was actually quite an eye-opener for many of us. But the picture all across Europe is more or less the same. If you look at the Danish picture, this is the diagram you would see. Basically, the problem is the same as in the rest of Europe. However, we have more women in the master degree than at the general level in Europe. We see the break comes also at the PhD level. And we see that there's a division, but it's not that big until it's very, very clear. In the Danish case, the glass ceiling sits in. When you move from assistant professor to associate professor, the level of women falls. Now, there's no progress in this. This is just to count how it was in 2013. And I took this number because the European number was from 2013 as well. And it's probably a bit better, but not very much. So this is the international scene. So the percentage of female professor is what we focus very much on when we talk about women in science. It's like the standard key performance indicator, if you could say that. And whenever the she-figures from the European Commission comes, we look at the she-figures to see, well, how are we doing? How are we doing? And we see Denmark. Well, I know we are a bit below the EU average. We are above the UK, and we are about Germany and slightly below France. And we could see we progressed from 2010 to 2013 very little. So the focus is very much on the level of professors. And we don't talk that much about the other levels. And the Council has been just looking at if the professor level is actually the best indicator for progress. And these are only Danish figures. And these are based... These data is from the Ministry of Higher Education and Science. And it's all what the universities are reporting themselves. So it's basically the university's own figures. And you can see the last figure here is 2017. And we can see that we are very happy the professor level is from 2010 to 2017 increased from 16% to 22%. But if we look at the other levels, the associate and the assistant professor level, the same picture doesn't imply there. And it's quite interesting, isn't it? That somehow with a lot of focus on the professor level, we managed to increase the level of professors. But we don't look at the associate professors and the assistant professors, and nothing happens. Now, just methodology-wise, the academic levels here imply assistant level. In these groupings I'm talking about is both assistant professor, which is in Danish, El Youngt and postdocs. And it's a bit odd that they are collecting in the same grouping here because they behave very differently. But when I say assistant level, it's both postdocs and assistant professors. Associate level is basically associate professor's lecture, but it's also senior researchers. And professor level, it's full professors, the ordinary professors, which they're called in Danish. And it's professor MSO, and I don't know what it's being translated into. So I'll call it MSO here, and I don't know if you know what it is. But it's a special professor category we have in Denmark. It could be five years, professor, so it's not a permanent position. It's a short-term position, and it's supposed to mean MSO in Danish which means med-serly, which is with special tasks. And then we have the clinical professors, which are mainly in the health area. But these three levels are what I here would refer to as the professor level. And the reason I say it's interesting to look at the professors is that when you look at the full professors and the professor MSO, we found out that the ordinary professors, like the normal professors, the number is not 22%, but it's 19.6%. And the professor MSO, like the short-term professorships for women, is 32%. So it's the stock there, which is quite interesting, isn't it? The clinical professors are also more, but it's only related to one area, so I'm not going to go into more with this. So we've actually been wondering about, is it because women are only hired as MSO professors? Is that sort of a lady professorship? Or is it because the professors are very old and the MSO category is relatively new, so when you hire people, it takes a long time until it evens out. And I was really hoping to get the recruitment figures and I got them last night at five o'clock, so I'm going to show them to you later. And we've really been interested to see if we could see any difference there. And we were hoping there wouldn't be any difference because then life would be better, wouldn't it? So the percentage of women in faculty positions, now, you were talking about Aarhus University and Aarhus being very bad, but I can assure you that Aarhus is exactly on the same level as average Denmark. And it's basically Aarhus is the average. So some are doing better, some are doing worse, but it's a general problem. Now, why is this happening? Why don't we just hire more women and then it would all be good? And this next part of my speech, I will try to concentrate why this apparently is slightly different. And now I will just show you a couple of slides which are not related to specifically women in science, but just general in science at universities. And before I start, you might want to tell me this is not relevant for my faculty, this is not relevant for my university. We do it differently, but I can assure you that we've been through universities, we've been through the different scientific areas. This occurs everywhere. So what the interesting part here is that if you look at the light blue, the 26%, these are positions and it's all three levels I was mentioning before, associate, assistant and full professors. These are the positions in 2015 to 2017 which were recruited to and there were no open calls. So about a quarter of all the positions, there are no open calls. So if you want to hire and have competition, of course it would be nice with open calls then you could follow it. If you look at the other part, the gray part, you would see approximately the same size. There's only one qualified candidate for the position. So of all the recruitment at the Danish universities, it's only a little less than half of the positions that you actually have competition. Yes. Is that all positions, so it's temporary positions or is it full positions? Well, it is all positions. Yes, it's associate, assistant and full professor level. So it's all the positions of all universities that have been... Assistant professors are temporary. They are temporary but... Yes, yes. Yes, a lot of them are temporary. It's all positions but still. It's true. So it's all positions that have been reported. Then we try to see how much diversity are there actually at the universities. We've had a lot more money coming to the universities. There are much more persistence at the universities than previously. How does it actually look with diversity? And again, this is not related to women in science. So we went back in the recruitment statistics back to 1995 to see how has this evolved. And what we actually thought was interesting in this is how regardless how much money and how many positions come into the system basically around 70%, which is the red line there, basically around 70% of all recruitment comes from the same university. So we would have expected to see a lot more mobility between the Danish universities and also international but approximately 70% always comes from the same university. So we tried to see if you look at the population of women in research, which I named before, the percentages, if we look at that and then we see how many more were recruited. Are there recruited more women than the stock or less women than the stock? We can see that most universities, also universities always recruit more women than they have in the stock already. So we can basically just see that two universities that tend to recruit less women than they have already. And then we were wondering about all these positions without open calls. So we tried to have a special look at the open calls versus the calls with no open calls. And we can see, well, you could see the figures here and they're not so big and it's from 2011 to 2013 and this was already published in the report from a previous minister. I had a task force for more women in science. Some years ago, that stated a lot of very good statistics about this issue and these figures are from this task force and therefore the figures are a bit older. But in general, we could see it helps with open calls. When there are open calls, women tend to get the positions to a higher degree than without open calls. And now you might say it's very odd because the law states that all positions must be in open calls. And there's a possibility of calling professors or associate professors and so on. But with the level of external funding, a lot of positions are on name, which is called Danish. So if you get a very nice funding from the Danish National Research Foundation, it might be on a specific name and then they can hire specific people within this. And, of course, this is not open call from the university but more external funding tends to be less open calls. Sorry, I just want to make sure that I am understanding correctly the numbers. So it says there that without open call, only 17% of women are actually called to female professors. No, no, no, no. No, this is when you recruit. Either you have an open call. But out of 100 persons that are recruited in Denmark, only 17 are women. That would be? No, no, so these are without open calls. These are all the positions. So if you have 100 positions where it's not called, so you're just hired without an advertisement. Okay, so it's only numbers within women. So if you have 100 professorships that are just hired without an open call, only 17% of these go to women. Okay, so if you have an open... And if you have an open call at least 24% of the professors will be women, so I mean it's still not very good but it's slightly better. So in that respect, the council is just concluding that open calls sort of support women more than... That totally happens at the professional level. Two other levels basically have a different to the other direction. Yeah. How do you understand that? No, I cannot give reasons for why the figures look like that. No, yeah, yeah, I understand that. And I think that in making the conclusion open calls for women. At senior level. At senior level, yes. Yeah, at the highest level. Yes. And that might be if you have a... So we have more external funding now that we used to have also from private foundations and so on. And what we also have found out is that a lot of the external funding has sort of... The instruments regarding external funding has changed. So what we see is that the external funding is to a large extent being concentrated in very big lumps. So you need to have a very good professor to apply for a very large sum of money. And then they hire PhDs and postdocs. Whereas 20 years ago, the external funding was less... But the external funding, there was also more money for assistant and associate professors that they could apply for in their own name. So what you see is that this money goes to a professor and then they hire. So the non-open calls on assistant-professor level would probably be as a part of a large research group. Yeah. So as I said before, we wanted to see if the professor MSO, it's a ladies' professorship or if it's not. And then we could see... And these are figures from 11 to 17. And we can see that there is a slight difference. There's a tendency that women to a larger extent when they get professors get to be professor MSO than men. But the figures are not that devastating when you look at the whole population. So it's... And we're very happy it's not as bad as we feared. Now, I talked before about these open calls and not open calls. Now, we only look at those calls that have been publicly announced, so the open calls. And when we look at all them, we could see that quite a few of these positions do either not have men or women that are qualified for these positions. And now we're coming into the real problem of why we don't just hire a lot of women. Because as you see, on the professor level and the associate professor level and assistant professor level, there are high numbers of positions where there are no qualified applicants. And of course, then it makes it difficult. I guess you want to say something. Yeah, because my question, I think, these are very useful numbers, but it would be interesting to see how many applications came as a first line. So what number of male and female came? What percentage of them were considered qualified? Because if we want to talk about gender bias that is hidden, maybe in the process of qualification, there is already a gender bias in that sense. So if I'm presented with ten women and ten men, maybe seven are qualified of the men and only four are qualified of the women. And that starts to be a little bit strange. So the entrance level is also important. How many applications did you receive? Yeah, I didn't bring the figures. I can find out later. Yeah, because I think that is an important issue as well. That will be a hidden gender bias. That could be a hidden gender bias. Yes, I think we concentrated on the qualified applicants because we didn't want to get into sort of discussion whether women or men were more or less qualified. But just say, well, this is what happens when you actually have the ones being qualified. But it is possible to make this calculation because it's also in these statistics, you ask both for how many applicants were there and how many were qualified and who actually got the position. So it is possible. And I can advise that the Minister of Higher Education and Science actually, and the statistics in their website, they publish every three years, they publish a very, very nice note on the statistics about recruitment. And I don't know if they have all... they don't have all the same figures as we do. But it's... they follow it and you can see a lot of information about men and women when it comes to recruitment. So these were the... these were the positions where there were no qualified men or women. Yes, now I... Yeah. And when we lower and see... we only look at the positions where there were both men and women qualified. So now we narrow the competition. These are very few positions we're actually talking about because a lot of the positions there was only one qualified. So now we narrow the positions where there were both men and women that were actually competing about the positions. And when we look at them, we can see that women are actually good at getting the positions. But it's just very, very few positions. You have an actual competition between men and women. Now, this is something completely different. These were figures about the recruitment statistics because I wanted to show you that it's difficult just to hire women. And we had a... a conference one and a half months ago where Jens Jort, who is a centre leader at the Danish... at the University of Copenhagen, he was saying, well, if you want more women, you should hire more women. And that's what he is doing at his centre. But you really have to make an effort because numbers... it doesn't just come as itself. It's actually difficult because there are very few positions. All right, what we are doing now is not to look at the recruitment. We wanted to see... and this is part of the council's project of Career Path. We wanted to see, in general, does it take longer time to get to be a professor today than many years ago because the assumption was that it's very difficult to be a postdoc in Denmark now because there are so many of them. So, we had a damper analytics which is a consultant agency and we had the permissions from the Minister of Finance to use all salary data for all researchers in Denmark on an aggregated level. And in there, you can follow how much they get in salary, but also when you switch from one category to the next category. So, you can actually follow how long time people stay in a position and when they transfer to the next position. And that is really, really interesting and also very sad because we can see as a general level that's nothing to do with this. Today, in Denmark, it takes two years more to become a professor than it did 15 years ago. Things are slowing up in the Career Path in Denmark. And then we thought, well, it would be nice to see if there's a gender difference and if it actually matters if you have children or not. So, we ran these figures also on gender and on whether people have children or not. And we cannot see if it's one or more children. It's just a matter of you have children. And then we divided up. So, everyone who's got a PhD degree from a Danish university and we have three cohorts from 1999 to 2002 and from 2002 to 2006 and 2007 to 2009. So, these three groups we were following to see, well, six years after, where are they? And this only replies to people who are within university. This slide has nothing to do with people leaving and going into industry and so on. Everyone here is at the university still. And we thought, well, how long time should it take from you to finish your PhD degree until you're actually through sort of the training process and you can have an associate within six years? So, how many people managed to get to be an associate professor within six years from they get their PhD degree? And then we looked at these cohorts and we could see that there used to be a major difference. And first of all, I would like to draw your attention to some of the early cohorts between men and women and especially actually those without children which are the lower three parts. I know this isn't Danish but I had to copy paste it. I don't have access to the real data myself so that's why it's in Danish. Please let me know if I'm going too fast and you don't understand. But I would like to draw your attention to the lower three groupings and the dark blue one is women and the light blue one is males. And I've never actually seen that before because there used to be quite a difference between men and women also those who do not have children and we tend to talk very much about maternity leave as being the main problem so we could see at least it used to be that there was a major difference between men and women also those who did not have children. We could also see that children used to be the major issue of whether you became an associate professor fast the ones without children used to go really fast through the system and progress in a career. For the last cohort we can see that basically everybody slows up also the ones without children and we can see that today women will children are really having a difficult time to come through the early stages and I'm sorry if I'm it might be very depressing to hear about it's also very interesting and one interesting part is there's only one group that is doing slightly better just a second one group that is doing slightly better in the newest cohort and that's actually males with children so where women with so it's quite interesting but we cannot see in the figures what's happening it's just you could just see this so we thought it would be interesting to see I wanted to ask if the six years if they include maternity or maternity leave it's true it's true it's yes yes and of course it would have been nice if we have cleaned it from maternity leave but that's methodologically a bit difficult in the following the payment the salary statistics so we cannot cope for maternity leave yes so from this depressing thing what is actually happening then to the ones who leaves academia and we tried to to do that as well it's the same colours women is the dark blue men is the light blue the same three cohorts the same years and here we saw how many actually left academia how many left universities six years after they finished their PhD and here we could also see that that basically a lot of people are leaving the universities but we can also see that women the greatest increase has come from the women so if you actually look at the recruitment base for women in science and to promote on to the full professor level it matters the proportion of how people are leaving academia so these were the figures I wanted to show you and what is the council then sort of concluding well they are saying that transparency and open calls basically helps it's good the more transparency you can have they think it's a pity that there are so many so few positions where there are open calls and where men and women are actually competing it would be a more healthy academic system with the real competition between the sexes they also note that when it occurs women have good chances of actually getting the positions and then they are worried it takes longer time to become an associate professor it's not necessarily very good for the quality of academia that it becomes more and more troublesome to be there sex seems to have less impact today than earlier everyone is slowing down and especially women with children are slowing down and women with children are increasingly leaving academia so and the last not very optimistic note I would like to share with you is we also looked at the salary how much on a lifespan people are earning in academia and we can see that it's really really expensive to get children it basically costs two thousand kroner per month for a life so with these depressing comments I'll say thank you very much that you invited me see we have an old report here well I can see well it's true it matters very much what sort of minister there is if there is a focus on this or not we just two weeks ago the negotiations of the finance bill was negotiated and Sufi Castanilson who is now member of parliament was actually making part of the agreement that there should be a yearly view of women in science and there should be a round table discussions with politicians and management and that has been accepted and there's a focus in that but of course as we have a discussion in Denmark there comes a new minister and there's been a new minister every once a year for the last four years and if they have not been occupied with this before you start from the scratch and say why is this a problem so it takes some time but I think he's really really interested and of course there's also a political culture in Denmark that as soon as you talk about women in science people tend to get very frightened that you start talking about quotas and so on so we try to stay away from that you can talk about plenty of things without ending up in quotas Thank you very much for the very sad talk but at the very beginning you said that it helps actually so based on numbers from other countries to implement other instruments to promote women so aside from more open calls what would you recommend Well we could see that in Denmark there's been twice we've had like national programs where money was set aside not solely for women but in the 19th there was a fire program a minister that really wanted to promote this and about I don't know 10 years ago the Udon program also in this and of course there's been a very harsh discussion in Denmark about these programs and whether it was helpful or harming more but it comes to a state where it's being discussed and as soon as people are basically discussing this issue this whole gender bias it helps in the respect for gender bias that you just discuss it because you became more aware the research councils start doing their figures on sex and they realize what's happening and so I would in Denmark I would not suggest to do quotas in these basically programs because it might harm more than good is but I personally find it difficult to understand why I talk with the head of the Irish Science Foundation and to be a peer reviewer for the Irish Science Foundation you need to take an online course in gender bias and I haven't done it but gender bias is not something that is only something men has I mean women fail just sign numbers and so it's you could do a lot of other things that would probably help and support and just to have focus and talk about it I think the funding seems to go more to men so would it be possible to study if there is a gender bias in funding agencies in Denmark with a finger list well and because the state funding agency actually every second year publishing all their figures and genders so you could see how many applied and for how much money was applied and who actually got the funding and I didn't bring the figures here and I can't remember them so there is a gender bias when it comes to how much money and how much funding women and men are getting but when you look at how much money women and men were applying for it's basically so much less I mean it equals up so it's not that women are applying for a lot of money and then they don't get it but there is a major difference between how much funding women and men were applying for there was another yes in regard to the question before about national legislation and requirements so you mentioned that also here in Switzerland we're doing quite well regarding the gender bias and I was wondering what their implementations were I can't remember all their programs but they actually had quite a few programs like the Udon program to promote women also on different levels and they also I think it was Austria that had a program promoting basically women in industry in science and industry so they had also a lot of debate about it and focus on the statistics and so on Oxford Research who was actually doing this report put in the back of the report all the links to all the different instruments and perhaps I can just send you the link and then you could perhaps distribute the report because it's much easier to look at I'm afraid that we're running out of time and there will be no time one more time for questions but please approach thank you I'm sorry we have to get started