Equity & Diversity

Sustainable scientific progress only thrives in an atmosphere of openness and mutual respect concerning different gender identities, sexual orientations, origins, social backgrounds, faculty cultures, religions, disabilities, ages or others. MATH+ has taken a variety of measures to create and preserve such an atmosphere within a dynamic environment.

Structures

The Mentoring, Gender, and Diversity Committee (MGDC) consists of professors, researchers, postdocs, and students from the participating institutions TUB, FUB, HUB, WIAS, ZIB, and the Berlin Mathematical School (BMS). It elects the Special Coordinator of Gender & Diversity (SCGD) as its chair, who is assisted by the Gender & Diversity Manager (GDM), a dedicated office position at the MATH+ Central Office.

MGDC has a regular meeting each semester. It initiates and coordinates suitable activities and also monitors its effects on the diversity of the faculty.

All members of MGDC, in particular MGD and SCGD, act as contact persons concerning all kinds and aspects of possible discrimination in the MATH+ faculty.

MGDC is supported by the Gender & Diversity Task Force consisting of MGD, SCGD, and the Managing Director of MATH+ with monthly meetings on current issues and developments.

Gender Equality and Diversity Awareness of Faculty Members

Regularly, MGDC offers seminar talks on gender & diversity aspects in mathematics and beyond.
As project leaders shape the atmosphere in their working groups and automatically act as first contact persons in any kind of possible discrimination, MGDC offers training for project leaders on equal opportunity aspects, intercultural communication, unconscious bias, and others.

Mentoring, Gender & Diversity Activities in the Berlin Mathematical School (BMS)

With students coming from all over the world, the open, respectful, and creative atmosphere of BMS is inspiring the whole MATH+ faculty. This dynamic cultural process is supported by the following measures.

• Mentoring program for Phase II students
• Hilda Geiringer scholarship
• Buddy program for new students (more information in the Guidebook for new BMS students)
• Intercultural training for new BMS students
• Soft-skills seminars (for women only)
• Counseling for female (or non-binary) students, student parents, and international students

Visibility, Female Role Models, and the Kovalevskaya Lunches

Conferences and workshops funded by MATH+ are required to meet strict gender equality criteria to increase the visibility of female researchers as speakers and, at the same time, give young researchers access to female role models.

Regularly, MATH+ organizes the very popular Kovalevskaya Lunches that were already established in 2007 and allow young female researchers to discuss career paths, networks, choices, difficult decisions, and opportunities with renowned female mathematicians in an informal setting.

Hanna Neumann Fellowships

Each year, MATH+ awards two Hanna Neumann Fellowships to female postdoctoral researchers in recognition of their outstanding work. Detailed information about the mathematician Hanna Neumann and this program, together with interviews with recent Hanna Neumann Fellows can be found here.

Recruitment

In order to fully exploit the recruitment potential with increasing scientific qualification, MATH+ has developed a systematic strategy for the recruitment of women on all career levels from talented students to top professors. Since 2019 MATH+ hired three MATH+ professors Claudia Schillings (FU Berlin), Gabriele Steidl (TU Berlin), and Andrea Walther (HU Berlin) on the three new MATH+ Professorships, one at each of the supporting universities.

In addition to these MATH+ professorships, the supporting institutions established six W1/W2 tenure-track professorships, two at each of the three participating universities. Five of these positions have meanwhile been filled successfully with two of them with the female professors Ana Djurdjevac (FU Berlin) and Maite Wilke Berenguer (HU Berlin).

Three out of six MATH+ Junior Research groups are currently filled with women, Franziska Eberle (TU Berlin), Sarah Wolf (FU Berlin) and Anna Hartkopf (FU Berlin).

Gender Equality and Diversity is one of the major pillars of BMS with the explicit goal to have half of the students come from outside Germany, and half of the students to be female (or non-binary). This goal is systematically pursued in each application round by the Admission Committee and supervised and monitored by the Gender & Diversity Task Force.

Institutional Research: MATH+ as a Research Object

The sociological project MATH+ as a Research Object aims at new insight into the ’leaky pipeline’ from qualifying to leading positions in academia through investigations of scientific recruitment in MATH+. The goal of the project is to identify existing gender differences, in particular in hiring processes, and to make suggestions for overcoming these differences.

Networking

MGDC strongly cooperates with the women’s representatives of TU, FU, and HU Berlin, WIAS and ZIB on all aspects of gender and diversity, in particular on the synchronization of equality concepts (Gleichstellungskonzepte).

Guidelines

• MATH+ Collegiality Statement
• MATH+ Advice on Diversity at Conferences and Workshops