Good Practices for Improving Gender Balance and Diversity Throughout an Academic Career

Abstract

Women are seriously underrepresented in Informatics and STEM areas in general. In this chapter, we raise awareness around some of the key issues and problems that women and other minority groups may face and identify good practices to improve gender balance—and diversity in general—in academia. Our goal is to cover the entire academic career: we start with the recruitment and application evaluation, discuss retainment of female talent, including work life balance, as well as promotion, including strategies to battle the glass ceiling and sticky floor phenomena. In each section, we also provide examples of actions that have been deployed.