munich

Research ministers of the European Union (EU) last week gave their backing to plans by the European Commission to promote women in science by increasing their role on advisory panels and in fellowship programmes.

German research minister Edelgard Bulmahn, whose ministry has adopted broad measures to promote women in science, initiated the move to endorse the plans (see Nature 399, 186; 1999).

The plan sets a target of 40 per cent participation of women on the advisory, evaluation and monitoring committees of the Commission's fifth Framework programme of research (FP5), launched earlier this year. They also aim for a similar level of female participation in the FP5's Marie Curie programme of fellowships for young researchers to work in another EU country, and include strategies for coordinating national efforts to promote the role of women in science.

The commission expects the fellowship target to be relatively easy to achieve, as women made up more than a third of the Marie Curie fellows funded in the fourth Framework programme (FP4), where no special measures for gender equality were taken. It is encouraging more applications from women through an information campaign to universities.

Meeting the target for committee membership could be more difficult. Less than ten per cent of the 2,000 or so evaluators for the FP4 were women, and the committees that will evaluate the first round of FP5 proposals must be drawn from a database of self-nominations from the research community. Yet less than 15 per cent of the entries on the database are women.

The commission is encouraging more women to nominate themselves for the database. It faced this problem last year in setting up the FP5's strategic external advisory groups. For these, women made up only nine per cent of names put forward by EU member states and 13 per cent of self-nominations. Despite this, it selected 27 per cent female membership, and 40 per cent of the groups are chaired by women.

Meeting in Berlin last week, the research ministers passed a resolution saying they recognized the under-representation of women in research and believed it should be tackled at regional, national and European levels. They also promised to ensure that statistics are gathered and made available, to “facilitate the development of appropriate policies at national and Community levels”.