Gender Equality and Work-Family Compatibility
The University of Göttingen considers equal opportunities for women and men and work-family compatibility as fundamental preconditions for the full realization of its existing potential for excellence in research, teaching, and training of junior fellows. Concrete measures to promote women in science are coordinated by the University’s Equal Opportunities Office.
The GlobalFood RTG benefits from gender equality measures already existing at the University and complements them with additional measures tailored to the needs of participants. Beyond pursuing diversity-positive recruitment, the RTG trains gender competences through soft skill courses, supports female career development and networking, and fosters work-family compatibility for both women and men.
Concrete measures to promote female participants of GlobalFood and to increase overall awareness to equal opportunities topics include:
- Coaching and mentoring program. Female doctoral and postdoctoral researchers benefit from a special coaching program. Group coaching sessions help to enhance overall planning skills and discuss general issues that women are confronted with in their professional life, whereas in individual coaching sessions more targeted aspects of personal career development are addressed.
- Female networking. Beyond cooperating with female researchers at Göttingen and IFPRI, there are plenty of female networking opportunities through the visiting researcher program. Moreover, special female expert talks and conversation rounds are organized, where female participants have the chance to interact with successful women from university, policy, and business environments.
- Child Care. In addition to the existing child care assistance at the University of Göttingen, special support is offered for evening and weekend events (e.g., conferences, workshops). Moreover, the RTG helps young mothers and fathers to organize and finance adequate child care abroad during data collection activities or research sojourns at partner organizations.
- Flexible Work Management Young parents get the opportunity to partly work from home and adjust working hours to their family needs.
- Diversity Competences As part of the RTG study program, a number of soft skill elective courses foster diversity competences among the fellows. In addition to a special course on “Gender & Diversity”, gender perspectives are also integrated into the curriculum of all other soft skill courses.
The University of Göttingen strives to increase its proportion of female staff. Therefore we specifically encouraged qualified women to apply for GlobalFood positions.