With the introduction of the Irène Curie Fellowship program, in July of last year TU/e took the step of opening each upcoming academic vacancy exclusively to women for the first six months of the recruitment period. Today, the Executive Board will announce how many new women scientists have been appointed thus far. In the great majority of cases, the successful applicant has been a scientist newly recruited to TU/e, says rector Frank Baaijens. In some cases a female postdoc at TU/e successfully applied for the position of assistant professor. “But since promotions fall outside the scope of the ICF program, a recruitment process was followed for all our new appointments,” says Baaijens.

Of the 35 new appointments, 29 are appointments to the position of assistant professor. In addition, women were appointed to two full professorships and two associate professorships. “For these last two categories of position, it is always difficult to find people,” says Baaijens. “Both men and women. It requires of the candidate the decision to move from one institution, where they have already built a career, to another. As far as opportunities for new assistant professors are concerned, some time ago our staffing policy was amended to provide more scope. An assistant professor will receive a permanent appointment within four years, provided the individual has the potential, in principle, to become at some later stage an associate professor and possibly a full professor. This change was made to ensure that in these positions, as in others, the proportion of women continues to increase in the coming years.”

Scouting

Baaijens says he is very pleased with the new group of scientists. “They are highly enthusiastic people, each and every one of them. And since we selected for quality, they bring a great deal of quality to TU/e. Many of them have come from our own network, or through networks such as ResearchGate. But we have also been actively scouting for talent. With the introduction of this program, as a university we are learning a great deal about scouting and how to recruit talent. This is an area that will assume greater importance in the coming years. Diversity at TU/e has been further boosted by having three-quarters of our new recruits come from abroad, a fact which doesn't surprise me at all, I have to say. And, indeed, greater diversity will in turn help us in our continued search for talent.”

Of all our departments Industrial Engineering & Innovation Sciences scored best, with their recruitment of eleven new women scientists over the past ten months. They were followed by Mathematics and Computer Science with eight fellows, and five at Mechanical Engineering. At the moment, no fellows have yet been appointed at Chemical Engineering and Chemistry and Industrial Design. Says Baaijens, “I should point out that only recently, in early 2019, Chemical Engineering and Chemistry appointed three women scientists. These appointments are not included in this overview because it runs from July of last year through to April of this year. In that period, Industrial Design had hardly any vacancies, but we have high hopes of seeing a couple of fellows appointed there before too long.”