Women Strike in Bern, Switzerland on June 14 2019. Photo Credit: Michel Bührer

Gender balance in the HS division- some personal thoughts

On 14 June 2019, there was the Swiss nationwide women strike day, with the main topic of equal pay for equal work (see e.g. here). A good opportunity to share some thoughts about gender balance in the HS division. If you have a look on the HS division composition today, you will see that we have a female president and a female deputy president, in addition 5 female officers out of 11 officers (in charge of the subdivisions) and a female early career scientist representative. Overall, 12 out of the 25 officers are female. This is indeed impressive and a nice achievement. It is without doubt the result of the passionate gender balance debate that took place during the 2014 HS business meeting (see my HEPEX blog post on this).

After that debate, it was clear that something had to change. And the change did happen! Why? Certainly because many colleagues became more proactive when looking for excellent female candidates for division positions. And, of course, because many female colleagues became less reluctant to accept these positions. I was one of them. And while I am extremely happy to see where we are now, I continuously ask myself how to make this change sustainable. Besides nominating female candidates at all levels, the most important task for all of us is certainly to keep the discussion alive, to make that little extra effort while looking for invited speakers or while nominating colleagues for awards and, more importantly, to make change happen at all levels, for example for the next summer school or for the weekly seminar.

The leaky pipeline as reported here.

And where is the link to the Swiss women strike? Back in 2014, I triggered the business meeting debate around gender balance because I had just heard about the wage imbalance in Switzerland. This imbalance continues to persist. It continues to not be explicable (e.g. here a link to a Swiss research project on this topic). And I have experienced it myself during a former position in Switzerland where my male colleague in the same lab and at the same position and with the same age and the same achievements had a considerably higher wage. Why did I not do something against it? Because I did not have the energy to fight. Let’s hope that those times are almost gone.