More women at the top say research institutes

4 March 2010

CWI, FOM, NIOZ, NWO employer and KB sign Charter 'alent to the Top

The joint employers in the NWO umbrella organisation (CWI, FOM, NIOZ and NWO employer) and the Koninklijke Bibliotheek (KB) will sign the Charter Talent to the Top this month. By signing this Charter the five employers are publicly announcing their intention to take concrete measures to enable more women to enter employment at their organisations, retain their jobs there and gain promotion to top positions. NWO’s chair Jos Engelen has signed the Charter as administrative head of the NWO umbrella organisation. The concrete objectives and the associated phased plans will be determined in the autumn.

Employers of the NWO umbrella organisation and the Koninklijke Bibliotheek recognise that more women at the top means an improvement in the quality of work produced and a greater diversity in the workforce. The signatories to the Charter Talent to the Top will focus on increasing the male/female diversity in their organisations, just like NWO is already doing with its various grant programmes for women in higher academic positions.

The chair of NWO signed the Charter on 10 March. The boards of directors of FOM, KB, CWI, NIOZ and NWO employer shall follow suit during the course of March. In the months following this, each of the institutes shall establish clear and measurable objectives as well as a strategy for realising these. The timeline for realising the objectives set is 3 to 5 years.

10 March: NWO umbrella organisation

Jos Engelen, chair of NWO, signed the document in his capacity as the administrative head of the entire NWO umbrella organisation, in other words FOM, CWI, NIOZ and NWO employer. NWO subscribes to the general objective of the Charter and furthermore, within a period of five years, it wants to see at least two women in all NWO boards.

18 March: FOM

Wim van Saarloos, director of FOM, signed the Charter on 18 March. This took place after the opening of the new building of FOM institute AMOLF. The Foundation for Fundamental Research on Matter (FOM) promotes fundamental physics research in the Netherlands. About 1000 people, many of whom are PhD researchers, work at FOM. Over the next five years, FOM aims to double the number of women in top positions.

23 March: Koninklijke Bibliotheek

Bas Savenije, director-general of the Koninklijke Bibliotheek, will sign the Charter Talent to the Top on 23 March. Savenije is a firm proponent of women in top management positions. The KB, national library of the Netherlands, attracts quite a lot of female talent. With a focussed policy it retains this talent and is encouraging more women to assume leadership positions. The KB is not part of NWO but belongs to the same employers’ association (WVOI).

24 March: NIOZ

Carlo Heip, general director of NIOZ Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research shall sign the Charter on 24 March: “More than 50% of our PhD positions are now filled by women. Yet via postdoc positions that percentage rapidly falls to just 10% female senior researchers in the permanent staff. We want to reverse that decline. Moreover, the number of women occupying top positions in our support departments and on our research vessels can also increase."

25 March: CWI

The Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI) is very proud of the female top researchers and PhD students currently on its permanent staff. They serve as a role model for a new generation of scientific talent. CWI director Jan Karel Lenstra shall sign the Charter on 25 March. By doing this, CWI wants to clearly show its aim of encouraging and enabling female natural scientists to find a position where they have the opportunity to carry out research and deploy their talents.

30 March: NWO employer

NWO is the national science funding body, devisor of research programmes, and manager of research institutes. NWO is also the employer of the institutes ASTRON, ING, NSCR and SRON and of the offices of STW and NWO. Cees de Visser, NWO’s director general, shall sign the Charter in the capacity of the employer. An optimal diversity in the workforce is a precondition for quality. By signing the Charter, NWO wishes to show its general intention of realising greater male/female diversity in the highest positions. The measures that will be realised to this end shall be specifically chosen in accordance with the perspective of the individual institutes and offices and the separate considerations of scientific and non-scientific positions.

Taskforce Talent to the Top

The Charter Talent to the Top is an initiative of the Taskforce Talent to the Top. The Taskforce came into being as a result of a close cooperation between the Dutch employer's association VNO-NCW, trade union FNV, the Social and Economic Council of the Netherlands (SER), representatives from the commercial sector and the Minister for Economic Affairs and the Minister for Education, Culture and Science. The chair is Sybilla Dekker. Esther Raats-Coster is the director.
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last modified on 7 April 2010