The Breaking Barriers Project: recruiting women into management

Jan Boggs, director of the Breaking Barriers in the Workplace project at the University of Liverpool, has anarticle at Nature jobs on recruiting women into management positions. According to Boggs' interviews with senior women in the bio- and health sciences, they "felt that, in order for others to progress, and in greater numbers, traditional models of management needed to be challenged throughout the organization." Some of Boggs' suggestions for employers:

• transparent recruitment and promotion procedures
• flexible work hours that are clearly endorsed by the employers
• networking events during regular work hours so that employees who are unable to work late can participate
• rewarding quality of work rather than the number of hours in the workplace
• encouraging a "mentoring culture," such that mentoring is part of an employee's normal workload, rather than an "add on"
  

Those seem to me to be reasonable suggestions that would benefit both women and men who don't have a full-time stay-at-home spouse.

If you work in the biological science or health care sector, you can help the Breaking Barriers project by taking a brief online survey.

Tags: gender gap, women in science, biotechnology, medical science