Af Lea Laursen Pasgaard, AAU Communication. Graphics: Shutterstock og Søren Emil Søe Degn, AAU Communication 

Half of the external members of AAU's University Board must be women. For the rest of management, the target is 31 percent. These are the university's new targets for the underrepresented gender on the board and in other senior management that the board adopted at its last meeting in December. This follows a tightening of the Act on Gender Equality, which means that the university must now also set targets for the board.

Room for improvement

Rector Per Michael Johansen believes that the new target figures can help push the university in the right direction in terms of creating more equal gender distribution in the university's management positions.

- The gender imbalance is a challenge; we are aware of this in the management. We therefore need more talented women to be part of the management, says Per Michael Johansen.

The chair of the AAU Committee for Equality and Diversity, Dean Lars Hvilsted Rasmussen, Faculty of Medicine agrees there is room for improvement. Today, women make up 33 percent of the external members of the University Board and 25 percent of the rest of the university's senior management, which in addition to the rector includes the other members of the Executive Management, pro-deans, department heads and administrative heads with the title of deputy director.

An immediate challenge is that we don’t have a good distribution of applicants for positions, for example. So we must start lower in the hierarchy, because we need to include all types of talent. In recent years, we have implemented a number of different initiatives under the Committee for Equality and Diversity, says Lars Hvilsted Rasmussen, including the university's new maternity procedures, the mentoring programme and measurements on inclusion.

Targets must be realistic

To meet the new targets, the university must employ at least three additional women in senior management compared to today. This corresponds to an improvement of six percent and a relative improvement of 20 percent.

Over the next three years, the fixed-term appointments for 20 managers in AAU's top management layer, 19 of whom are men and one is a woman, will expire. The university must secure more women in these positions in order to increase the target figure.

In its last strategy period, the university had a target figure for the gender composition of senior management – minus the board – of 25 percent women and 75 percent men. This corresponds to two additional women or an increase of five percentage points. However, the targets were not met – the number of women in senior management remained unchanged from 2019-2021.

Do you have an idea as to why the goal was not achieved in the previous strategy period?

- When we look at the numbers, we have been good at replacing women managers with other women. On the other hand, we have been less successful at finding women for positions previously held by men. Some of the explanation probably lies in the field of applicants, while some can be attributed to culture and bias. We have become accustomed to a male leader, and we thus unconsciously associate the management position with a man when we recruit for the position. We are very keen to change this, Lars Hvilsted Rasmussen says.     

How do we do this?

- Specifically, we have developed a toolbox for appointment and assessment committees to reduce unconscious bias before, during and after the interview. In addition, we will offer a competency development course for potential managers so we strengthen our own internal recruitment base.