Access, obstacles and potential – women researchers’ international mobility

Together with the reference data, the comparison of female representation on the various levels of academic careers in the countries surveyed indicates that there are currently qualified women researchers who are not yet being reached by the Humboldt Foundation’s programmes. This is particularly true for Algeria, India, Netherlands, Nigeria, South Africa, Tunisia and the United States.

Women are very differently represented in the science systems of the countries surveyed – but supranational patterns and obstacles do emerge that prevent women from pursuing research internationally:

• Gender-specific division of labour in families can be a real obstacle to women’s international mobility. Moreover, the fact that caring responsibilities are allotted to women feeds the basic assumption that international mobility is barely practicable due to women researchers’ family commitments. Consequently, women are less frequently considered for an international research stay.
• Women are more frequently confronted with institutional obstacles because, to a greater extent, they hold positions that are allocated less time and fewer financial resources for research.
• Female researchers are more often in precarious employment and thus have more fragile networks. This means that a temporary absence from their own institutions may endanger their careers.
• Furthermore, gender-specific inequalities are reinforced by other factors such as social or ethnic origin.

Men more frequently cooperate with men, women with women: This pattern is also replicated in cooperation between international sponsorship-recipients and their academic hosts in the Humboldt Network in Germany. In this context, the survey recommends recruiting yet more women as hosts. Moreover, incentives should be introduced to encourage male hosts to recognise, nominate and mentor more women as collaborative partners.

The Humboldt Foundation offers benefits in the form of subsidies towards the costs of health insurance and third-party liability insurance to researchers who are accompanied by their children and marital partners. But some highly qualified international women researchers have other needs. They are often childless, and if they have a partner, they tend, in the words of the study, not to be “portable partners.” This is why dual career opportunities are often more relevant for international mobility. Furthermore, the study recommends the Foundation to campaign for general conditions that extend family benefits to include unmarried hetero- and homosexual couples and additional individuals in order to take account of different family models.

The gender equality measures introduced by the Humboldt Foundation so far overwhelmingly aim at sensitising women and making them more visible as (potential) sponsorship-recipients (fixing the women). Looking forward, the survey recommends a greater emphasis on addressing female academic hosts, structural causes and institutional obstacles in science systems (fixing the system) as well as campaigning to enhance gender competence and knowledge (fixing the knowledge).