German government will fund 1000 professorships starting in 2017 and 2019.

so there is hope... I wonder how many jobs will go to the humanities and how many to the scientific sector.

Germany is relatively difficult. I can imagine that Germany has significant brain drain for the reasons mentioned in the article. I had many German colleagues in Switzerland and only a minority returned to Germany.

I guess if the universities apply for these professorships that they have some inbfluence on how they are distributed to the various disciplines.

The universities have to start paying after six years so  I wonder how many will grant tenure....

well, the article is also right about women - those who I know left Germany and did not return are women, those who returned are many, and there are about 5 of each whom I know

Competition is biased against women as it is, which is reflected in the higher number of male professors, which is not a fair representation of merit. Women often sacrifice career to family and settle for part-time positions. I think ensuring a quota would go a long way towards a fairer chance to get a professorship. 

Competition is biased against women as it is, which is reflected in the higher number of male professors, which is not a fair representation of merit. Women often sacrifice career to family and settle for part-time positions. I think ensuring a quota would go a long way towards women having a fairer chance to get a professorship. 

A high number of male professors per se it not a valid indicator of biased competition. Men are the majorty also in the police and in the fire brigades, and no one protests against that. The likely result of having gender quotas is to give professorship to researcher that are not competent enough, and to pave the way to other forms of quotas based on, say, religion, sexual preferences, and so on and so forth. The promotion of academic career among women should be based on other incentives and measures. Quotas bias competition and discriminate men. Merit and productivity should be the only valid criteria.

Sure, equal opportunities should be promoted. But gender quotas are not the appropriate tool to achieve this goal. 
 

Actually there is plenty of evidence that they do work: http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2014/03/economist-explains-14

The article from the Economist provides no evidence that productivity and merit increase because of gender quotas, sorry. It just says that quotas result in an increase of women in leadership positions in private companies. No surprise, quotas force companies to do so.

Quotas can reduce discrimination and improve diversity and representation in the workplace, without affecting productivity in a negative way. Equal opportunities measures are clearly insufficient so quotas are a way of reversing the status quo with certain groups being more privileged. 

One fails to see how gender quotas can reduce discrimination since they are aimed precisely at discriminating men, irrespectively of their level of competence and their merit. The choice of the quota's threshold, for example, is totally arbitray. 20%? 40%? Why not 60% to compensate for other forms of "discrimination" in the private sector? Equality of opportunites should be pursued by other means. Access to professorship should be based exclusively on merit.
 

The point is that there are way more men than women professors (and in most leading roles in society) and this has to change. Sadly it looks like this scheme will do nothing to address this issue. Quotas are not the only way to do this but they are a way of ensuring equal representation when other measures are not working.  Discriminating a privileged group is hardly discrimination in my view. 

The point is that there is no such a thing as a clearly defined group of privileged persons called "men", a group that shares everywhere common objectives and priorities. Male young researchers, assistant professors, PhD students do not have any partcular solidartiy relationships with other male professors in universities or research centers around the world. They simply compete in the job market for available postions, sometimes in different countries, and very often they do not know who they new colleagues are going to be. Quotas bias such competition. And this is unfair. The Nachwuchspakt does not provide quotas, and this is good news.

Men are privileged in Germany, if a woman is married she is likely not to get any position, since the husband earns enough for both as salaries are high. I know of married friends of mine that the husband went with her to the interview to tell he is unemployed so she needs the position.

Also, in the student dormitory we had quotas, for women and for different nationalities, and for disciplines at the university. The quotas reflected those of studentship. For women the quota was mainly to have a minimum of women as men feared not to get any girlfriend otherwise ;)

 You appear to be saying that the higher representation of men in higher positions is an accurate reflection of merit and I disagree with that wholeheartedly. I think people who view things that way (men mostly) represent a huge obstacle to equality. Men do enjoy a privileged status in society by virtue of the fact that they are the ones making most decisions, the fact that men mostly benefit from this is clearly visible to everyone. Anyway, I can't see this exchange going anywhere so I will leave it there. 

So far, the focus of current discussion is on gender and quota. Maybe we should think more.

Selection criteria for academic position is based on merit and productivity, but not only, if it is the only one, then how about nationality? Should foreigners have the equal chance to get an academic position? The fact is that it’s not true in reality, since there is a thing for foreigner, work permit, like quota.

For academic jobs, there is quota for women, then how about other jobs? Should we have quota or not?

Someone said that female people sacrifice their time on family, then should we have quota for male and female people have children? Quota for people have 3 or more children, like tax to a family, more children, less tax.

Another question is, to be equal is good or not for our society? How to define equality? What’s the percentage to be equal? It’s similar to  the question: To be democratic is good for our society of not? Like Brexit.

Quota is just small part of the whole cake, and it’s not a fully reasonable and rational way to promote or prevent something, but it’s a easy and efficient way. Back to the gender and quota, I think it is a good idea to have quota for female ones, at least in the academic field, though more things should be discussed in details.

I won't go into this discussion, but it is interesting to see some of your thoughts. Here is a link on a Gender Equality conference in Bern from last month (I already posted in Gender Equality for Mobile researches in Science): http://www.snf.ch/en/researchinFocus/newsroom/Pages/news-160705-conference-gender-and-excellence.aspx

You'll find all the presentations and abstracts of the conference. It was organised by Swiss National Science Foundation, and they have recognized the problem of under - presented women in academia/science, by offering funds only for women who left the academia for childbirth. However, and this is my opinion, I don't think any of measures to enhance presentation of women in science/academia will work unless the overall government politics in EU (in some countries) changes. For example, in Switzerland women have only 4 month maternally leave, expensive kindergartens and so on.

Needless to say, yes, I agree with Helen.

Cheers

Thanks to Maja for the interesting link to actual research into the question of gender bias. The presentation on ERC grant selection was enlightening, as to how concepts of excellence and merit differ for male and female researchers; and how refusing to consider this reinforces gender bias, whereas addressing it can increase research quality.

At the moment we are preparing some data about the long-term career development of people who received Marie Curie Fellowships in the 1990s and it is clear that around twice as many men as women achieved a position equivalent to professor. This is from the background of all candidates having to write a successful project proposal and men being significantly overrepresented in this initial success. The results cannot be explained by the number of people who disappeared completely, which was roughly similar for both genders.

In Germany, the Männlich Deutsch MINT survey came out recently and women have even less chance of making research career in German industry than academia. It highlighted that only 19% of researchers in German industry are women and less than 5% from foreign countries. Only the life sciences industry comes anywhere close to gender parity. My personal thinking is that the group think shown by the VW scandal can be directly linked to the uniformity of the research, development and management personnel involved. If Germany is worrying about the skills shortage (Fachkräftemangel), there is plenty of room to do things better.

My experience of representing our members in Germany is that it is often said that they are very well paid. The truth is that the level of pay is no better than what any male engineering Wissenschaflicher Mitarbeiter is paid anyway. The point is that the general level of pay for researchers from disciplines with higher female participation, such as, the Humanities, Social Sciences and Life Sciences, is significantly lower. The starting point of the MSCA is equal pay for all equivalent researchers.