She is skeptical towards quotas but believes the university must find other ways to enable women to advance their careers. Lundagård asked the Pro Vice-Chancellor Eva Wiberg about the measures being taken by the University Board.
In ten years the ratio of female doctorates has never exceeded 50 percent, while the ratio of female lecturers and professors peaked at 40 and 25 percent respectively at Lund University.
Eva Wiberg is Pro Vice-Chancellor and second highest in the hierarchy at the university. She believes that a large part of the problem stems from the greater extent to which men at the university are allowed to assert themselves and do research, for instance, while women often end up with administrative positions and holding lectures. This makes it difficult for women to advance their careers.
– Women must assert themselves and say: I am going to do research now. We have different projects to allow women to qualify themselves further but it is not enough today.
What responsibility does the University Board have in this situation?
– The Vice-Chancellor appoints professors and when they are appointed the faculty must be able to disclose the gender-ratio in the faculty. If yet another man is to be hired, we always ask the question.
Both the university’s chairman of the board Margot Wallström and Kajsa Widén, head of the leadership program AKKA at Lund University think the university should employ quotas. What is your take on that?
– Generally I disapprove of quotas. I can see how it might do good in certain situations but as a woman I feel quotas are a bit degrading, it’s like saying that women can’t handle this themselves. But at the same time I feel that you have to have the courage to reconsider and to restrict some positions to female applicants, in other words, to use quotas.
Eva Wiberg believes the gender distribution often has subtle reasons, that the ”gate keeper” seldom is aware of imposing any sort of restriction. To deal with this, the university has leadership programs and professors that are being paid for by the government to promote equality, so-called Hedda-professors. She also sees the need for initiatives like Step up.
– It’s good that it’s an initiative undertaken by doctoral students in the organization, not just top-down directives. Any measures must be built on enthusiasm and because of that I simply think that passionate people are more likely to succeed.
Are you saying that there is a lack of enthusiasm towards promoting gender equality within the university?
– No, of course not. But it’s good that these types of initiatives are being taken and that we’re able to support and promote them. For instance, now we provided the money that allowed the event to take place.
How will you address the issue in the future?
– In the best of worlds, our goal would be to reach a gender distribution of 50/50 among professors but normally you’ll be settling for 60/40. If we could reach that goal by 2020, that would be very good.
Read more on the universitys equality work:
Translation: Jesper Lodin
Text: Virve Ivarsson
