The gender equality endeavors at SDU are anchored in the university's central gender equality committee. All the university's faculties and its central administration have members representing them in the committee, and its chair, Ole Skøtt, is the dean of the Faculty of Health Sciences and a member of SDU's Executive Board. This central gender equality committee is supported by SDU's Gender Equality Team, GET. The central gender equality committee simultaneously acts as steering committee for GET.
The strategic Gender Equality initiative at SDU have three initial focal areas. These are presented below.
Recruitment processes
There are numerous advantages to incorporating a gender equality perspective in all aspects and steps of academic recruitment processes.
At SDU, SDU’s Gender Equality Team consequently collaborates closely with faculties and departments concerning their academic recruitment processes. The team offers advice tailored to local requests, and provides qualified counselling related to all aspects of the processes, from wording and placement of job announcements to questions related to evaluation criteria and candidate interviews.
Unconscious Bias
Being unaware of hidden potentials and proceeding on autopilot in decision making processes can lead to results that do not take all possibilities and perspectives into account. In SDU’s work with unconscious bias, focus is on how especially leaders can ensure decision making processes where more aspects and perspectives are included. This typically entails changes in who leaders look to for advice, how and where leaders seek inspiration etc. More information about unconscious bias is available in Resources and inspiration.
Gender Statistics
SDU needs a clear overview of the gender equality situation in the organization in order to have a proper baseline for its gender equality endeavours. To this end, SDU has established a Gender Statistics dataplatform, encompassing quantitative and also – in the long run – qualitative data about SDU’s employees and gender equality work. Among other things, it contains gender aggregated data on the number of employees, new employees, leaders etc. SDU's Gender Statistics will be incorporated as a integral part of the current leader information at SDU, and it is accessible from SDU’s intranet here for all employees (requires login) in Danish under the category "nøgletal" (key figures).
Other Gender Equality initiatives at SDU
In addition to the strategic gender equality initiative with its three focal areas presented above, several other important and inspiring gender equality endeavours take place across SDU. The strategic initiative and SDU’s Gender Equality Team has close collaborations with several of these local initiatives. Local gender equality committees are in place at all SDU’s faculties and in its Central Administration, and these six committees have their own websites (some only or mostly in Danish) with committee information, minutes from meetings, latest news about local gender equality efforts etc.:
Gender Equality Committee at the Faculty of Humanities
Gender Equality Committee at the Faculty of Science
Gender Equality Committee at the Faculty of Business and Social Science
Gender Equality Council at the Faculty of Health Sciences
Equality and Diversity Committee at the Faculty of Engineering