Together with 11 other Danish university environments within STEM, DTU Compute and DTU Bioengineering receive support from the VILLUM Foundation the Novo Nordisk Foundation and a strategic innovation agency to establish Living Labs for a targeted effort to strengthen diversity.
Text: Hanne Kokkegård, DTU Compute
Among those who complete a master’s degree in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics), there is a noticeable disparity in the number of women compared to men who choose to pursue careers in academia. This “leaky pipeline” of female talent represents an untapped potential, critical for Denmark’s ambition to secure a position as one of the world’s leading nations in STEM disciplines in the future.
Consequently, two huge Danish foundations (VILLUM FONDEN and Novo Nordisk Foundation) and the strategic innovation agency IS IT A BIRD have invited university environments to develop concrete strategies for supporting diversity within their specific research settings. This effort has led to the establishment of a series of collaborations known as ‘Living Labs’, encompassing a total of 13 research environments across Denmark, one of them at DTU Compute where, in addition to concentrating on women, the work also includes the foreign PhD students and employed researchers. Another lab is at DTU Bioengineering
The goal of ‘Living Labs’ is to investigate various strategies for providing Danish STEM environments with well-defined ideas and recommendations to enhance diversity and inclusion. The ideas might include initiatives aimed at reshaping maternity and family support systems, emphasizing the recruitment and retention of female staff, or addressing broader cultural shifts within research settings.
The expectations are high at the Villum Foundation and the Novo Nordisk Foundation:
“The number and diversity of the applications that IS IT A BIRD has received shows that the need for change is widely recognized in the university environment, and this bodes well for the development work that the project’s Living Labs will embark on.”
It is the research environments themselves that will be developing the initiatives and driving the change processes. At the same time, the team from IS IT A BIRD will follow the Living Labs closely by monitoring and evaluating the initiatives to document what it takes to create lasting positive change within diversity in STEM research.
Compute’s target groups resemble each other
DTU Compute has around 50 percent of employees from all over the world, and at the department, you can see that there can be a lot of overlap between being a woman and a researcher and coming from a country other than Denmark concerning ‘fitting in’ with the stereotype by a researcher, explains Head of Department Jan Madsen:
“The goal is that the knowledge we acquire through the project must be used to initiate concrete measures to increase the proportion of female researchers. We also hope to be able to use the collected knowledge to learn more about how we can create a different story about being a researcher in the STEM subjects; a story that can be used in, among other things, recruitment, onboarding, and other relevant places.”
At DTU Compute, it is a natural part of our everyday life to ensure a safe and supportive working environment for everyone there. We believe that innovation, creativity, and job satisfaction are strengthened by diversity; cultural, professional, gender-related, and more.
For several years, DTU Compute has had a special focus on diversity in particular and, among other things, regularly hold ‘Diversity Talks’ with presenters who talks about their research and initiative concerning diversity within the research world, including the cultural meeting at an international workplace such as DTU.
So, since Autumn 2023, together with other Danish research environments, we have worked to develop living labs that will come up with concrete ideas for how diversity can be further strengthened. The living lab at DTU Compute focuses on strengthening the number of women at the institute and our courses and looking at how we can improve the framework for foreign students and researchers.
To emphasize the importance of working with diversity, DTU Compute has just appointed a Head of Diversity and formed a management group. Next, two so-called ombuds persons will be appointed. Learn more about the setup below.
Head of diversity – primary role
- Stir the pot – to wonder, to ask questions, to question status quo
- Be part of the management group
- Drive an organizational change/culture change
- Strategic focus on how diversity and inclusion can improve management decisions, research collaboration and ideas, and teaching for our faculty.
- Focus on developing a working environment with high level of psychological saftety
Ombuds persons – primary role
If employees experience sexual harassment or discrimination they have the option of talking to their immediate manager, supervisor or head of section. However, some people feel reluctant to contact these roles and would prefer to speak with someone who is not a manager or do not have a role of power. The two ombuds persons act as these one-point of entrance or back-up that you can go to with your experiences.
The primary task for the ombuds persons will be to:
- Collect important knowledge about the kind of sexual harassment that employees at DTU Compute experiences and detect patterns. This knowledge is to be shared anonymously with the DEI group at an overall level to discuss the need for concrete initiatives.
- Be the go-to person when people feel the need to share their experiences. The ombuds persons are not obliged to report the incidents or take matters further, unless they are specifically asked to by the employee. In that case, the ombuds person acts as guide on how to report, to whom and what happens. The ombuds persons will receive training in the reporting process at DTU in collaboration with the HR support at DTU.