Gender Equity 1: KIT’s ambitious project to boost equal opportunities

As most other universities of science and technology in Europe, the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) is faced with the special challenge of alluring and keeping more women. That is why the project Gender Equity 1 was initiated. Combining a top-down- and a bottom-up-approach, KIT aims to foster a process of cultural change towards more gender equity, trigger an intensive university-wide examination of and reflection about the topic of equal opportunities and, in the long run, raise the fraction of women at all career levels.

To attain these goals, KIT committed itself to a very ambitious course of action:

• Firstly, the Executive Board and the Heads of Division participated in a Culture and Vision Workshop to define an overall equal opportunity strategy and a culture of appreciation for gender equity. The results were summarised in the form of a presentation available for all staff members.
• Secondly, up to 30 staff from each of the university’s five divisions, as well as the administrative units, analysed division- and discipline-specific particularities and identified corresponding core areas. After six brainstorming workshops, staff developed ideas for tailor-made activities geared towards the core areas and the overall strategy. Since the summer, fourteen activities have been funded with up to €75,000 each for up to two years.
• Finally, successful applicants will exchange experiences in a so-called ‘metaforum’ to learn from each other. These experiences will flow into the institution’s further strategic development.

Now in the second year of the seven-year project, signs are already mounting that more people at KIT are interested in the topic of gender equity and willing to play an active part in improving the equal opportunity situation.

In summary, we are convinced that an extensive cultural change can only be reached by attracting the interest of and involving as many people as possible with equal opportunity issues. We believe that with Gender Equity 1, we are on a good path to put this plan into practice.

The project is part of the German Universities Excellence Initiative. Since the end of 2019, the KIT is funded as one of eleven German Universities of Excellence by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research and the Ministry of Science, Research and the Arts of the State of Baden-Wuerttemberg.

For more information please contact Roxane Soergel (Consultant for Diversity at KIT).

EDI.Lab invitation 10 November

Roxane will share more about the experiences and insights from KIT in relation to their efforts to boost equal opportunities at our next EDI.Lab and you are invited to join us:

• EDI.Lab 10 November event page (a video recording will be available via this link after the event)

EDI.Lab is our online seminar series for sharing best practices in Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI). All staff at our Member universities are invited to register for the seminar via the event page link above, and our EDI.Labs may be of extra interest to members of our Workgroup EDI Liaisons and our Task Force Human Resources.

If you have a colleague who may be interested to participate in an EDI.Lab event, then please feel free to share the link to this webpage with them. If they do not yet have access to our Extranet, please invite them to complete this form to get access.

For more information about our EDI.Labs, please contact our Senior Advisor for Research & Innovation Mattias Björnmalm.