Cultural change towards a gender-neutral landscape in science, academia and research in 2025

Abstract

Austria has a long tradition of gender equality policy measures in science, academia and research. Since the 1980s, a mix of measures has been successively introduced to promote excellent female scientists and academics, establish women’s and gender studies and remove the structural barriers for women. Accordingly, an increase in the share of women in all areas and functions in science, academia and research and the inclusion of gender studies in an increasing number of disciplines has been achieved in recent years. Despite this, the notion of the “scientific ideal” has remained almost unchanged, i.e. is still based on a typically male scientific career. This notion essentially considers a “good” scientist to be one who can devote his life totally to science and has no other restrictions on his time or commitments outside science. The question now is, what – and where – can we add to the existing policy mix to change this situation, i.e. to revise this notion of the “ideal”. At a series of workshops, researchers, academics and other experts used creative methods to develop their visions of a gender-neutral landscape in science, academia and research in 2025. These visions were then used to identify relevant fields of action for initiating cultural change. This paper summarises the results of this discursive process and outlines how the process that began with this project could now be continued.