A précis of 'The unbalanced hierarchy', a report from the EU-funded project 'Thus far – and further'

Författare

Ann Mari Sellerberg

Summary, in English

'The unbalanced hierarchy' addresses equal opportunities in academia. One of the key issues we face is that women are not being absorbed into the research community. Birgitta Odén, emeritus professor of history at the University of Lund, laid out the problems in her study 'Ju högre, desto färre' ['The higher you go, the fewer there are'] (Odén 1996). The phenomenon has also been described as 'a leaky pipe'.

It was against this background that the project 'Hit – och ännu längre!' ['Thus far – and further!'] was initiated in September 2006, funded by the EU European Social Fund. It has comprised twelve guest professors, all women and from several different countries, who 'supervised' postgraduate students and initiated workshops and seminars at the University of Lund. Their visits lasted between a week and a month, and were timed to avoid overlapping with one another. As a result the Department of Sociology (which includes the departments of social anthropology, sociology of law, and media and communication studies) benefited from a series of visiting professors throughout the year that ended in September 2007; the guest professors became a significant new element in the postgraduate students' working environment. There were at that point some forty postgraduate students in the fields that participated in the project, of whom there were more women than men.

Avdelning/ar