PRIO has been granted funds from the Research Council of Norway to promote gender balance in senior research positions. Through a training programme for female research staff, the goal is to increase the number of women with professor competence at the institute.
The funds have been granted by the Research Council of Norway's Initiative on Gender Balance in Senior Positions and Research Management (BALANSE). The programme seeks to promote gender balance at the senior level in Norwegian research through new knowledge, learning and innovative measures. The other recipients are NUPI, SINTEF and the University of Bergen.
PRIO has achieved its current strategic goal of promoting at least two women to research professor positions, and the new BALANSE funding allows PRIO to be even more progressive in its aims to create gender balance. The programme, which will include writing groups, leadership training, a mentor scheme and writing scholarships, will be organized as a three-year project from 1 January 2014 titled "Positioning Women for Research professorship (POWER): Early intervention at PRIO".
– Becoming a professor should be a natural development in a research career, and the work involved does not differ much from the work that researchers normally do. We wish to communicate this to our researchers, as women tend to both overestimate the work involved and underestimate their own readiness, said special adviser and project leader Lynn P. Nygaard in an interview with Kjønnsbalanse i forskning.
