EU-LIFE Pathfinder: supporting women postdocs to narrow the gender gap
The EU-LIFE Gender Equality, Diversity & Inclusion Working Group (GEDI WG) launches today a mentoring programme to support women early career researchers seeking to develop their careers. This initiative, addressed to female postdocs of EU-LIFE institutes, brings together over 40 mentors based in 15 different countries, who generously offered to share their experience and support their early-career peers. In addition to online meetings, the mentees will have the opportunity to visit the host institution of their mentor.
"We are absolutely thrilled to launch the EU-LIFE Pathfinder Mentorship Programme for Postdoctoral Women. The initiative is the brainchild of the Working Group on Gender Equality, Diversity and Inclusion, which is a topic that has always been at the heart of EU-LIFE activities. Despite many advances the gender gap still widens as women progress on the career ladder. We hope this offer will support our female postdocs to boost their career prospects in a range of professional options and benefit the EU-LIFE scientific community as a whole," said Dörthe Nickel, Co-Chair of the EU-LIFE GEDI WG and International Relations Officer at Institut Curie.
The goals of the EU-LIFE Pathfinder: Mentorship Programme for Postdoctoral Women are to:
- Support women postdocs on their paths to independence and professional development;
- Place a focus on the challenges women may encounter in their careers and possible approaches/solutions to those challenges;
- Provide EU-LIFE women postdocs with access to the entire pool of experienced mentors across 15 EU-LIFE institutes;
- Build an engaged and collaborative network of mentor-scientists across EU-LIFE institutes;
- Provide a platform for science managers/PIs from diverse scientific career paths to share their experiences, knowledge and advice with postdocs.
This initiative follows the success of the LIBRA Career Development Compass, a European Commission funded project conceived by members of EU-LIFE with the aim to develop and implement gender equality plans in research institutes.
