Record number of women professors at KTH
Nine of the new Professorial Chairs to be formally inaugurated on 16 November 2007 are held by women. Even if we still have quite some way to go to reach the goal of an equal proportion of women to men, this clearly indicates that our effort to strengthen the female position at KTH is paying off.
But why are just nine female professors regarded as such a big step forward, then? The answer is that usually, so far, just one new KTH professor a year has been a woman – until now, the maximum ever has been three.
Apart from the long-term ambition of increasing female participation everywhere in the whole KTH sphere, which has been a part of the Future Faculty project, a special extra effort was made during the autumn of 2007, aiming to rectify this lack of balance at the top academic level rapidly.
– This is one of KTH´s major quality issues – to widen the human circles we are recruiting our professors from, says Professor Anders Eriksson, Officiating President of KTH, who also took the initiative to this new effort. Unfortunately, it is a fact that our traditional recruitment processes do tend to conserve the old imbalance here, however formally correct they may be.
After this new appointments drive, the number of women professors at KTH has increased a good 50 per cent this year; further appointments during the late autumn will increase that share another 25 per cent, to 75 per cent totally in 2007, Prof. Eriksson points out.
– Every one of our Schools has started to look for, and evaluate, women scholars who may add new values to our university, he says. This is of the utmost importance to KTH´s future development, and I´m delighted to note that this includes our entire spectrum of subject areas – from particle physics to health care ergonomics. They all benefit from these injections of new intellects with new thinking.
Magnus Myrén