Women's Promotion at the HAWK - Why?
"The institutions of higher education take measures to eliminate disadvantages to women persisting in the university and college system as well as to promote women's and gender studies (equality order)"
In Germany, we look back on approximately 100 years of history of the admission of women to higher education. This history would be inconceivable without the women's movement and without committed female pioneers. Yet in the higher education sector, women are still subject to multiple and diverse discriminations and burdens due to their sex, as numerous studies verify. Science still appears as almost solely a masculine occupation and women and men are still studying in gender-specific ways. Also, the history of science withholds women’s accomplishments in and for the production of knowledge to the greatest possible extent. This hierarchisation is currently taking effect in all of the dimensions of higher education’s everyday life: in male-dominated job politics, in the androcentric setting of focal themes in lecturing and research, in the allocation of financial means and equipment, in the organisation of courses of study. The gendered structuring of universities and colleges can nowadays be reduced to a simple formula: the higher the level of qualification, the lower the proportion of women.
The Women's and Equal Rights Representatives and the Women's and Equality Office
The Women's and Equality Office represents the interests and concerns of all the women who are teaching, researching or working at the university of applied sciences. It is expressly instructed to contribute to the realisation of equality of women and men, which means to counteract the discrimination of women in the higher education system.
The tasks following from this are:
- Implementation of programmes and measures for the promotion of women
- Consultation and support of female university members
- Advanced / further [vocational] training
- Initiatives for the increase of the female-specific range of lectures
- Participation in appointment procedures and advisory cooperation in staffing decisions
- Public relations work
You may contact us, if, e.g.:
- You feel discriminated at work / at your place of study
- You are being sexually harassed
- You need information, e.g. concerning your place of work / study
At the Women's and Equality Office, you will find free-of-charge-brochures on the following subjects:
- Studying while having a child
- Mutterschutz (~ legal protection of working mothers)
- Erziehungszeit (~ time taken off work after the birth of a child)
- Pension
- Part-time work