Programme for female early career researchers

The mentoring programmes ProScience & ProViae both accompany and support well-advanced female doctoral candidates, postdocs, and junior professors in orientation and decision-making processes as well as in their their competence development over a period of 12 or 18 months, enabling them to set the course for their own career path individually and competently.

Furthermore, we are trying to be responsive to a variety of needs and life circumstances and appreciate your trust. Please let us know, how we can support you.

Above that, the university offers an open programme of demand-oriented workshops (e.g. on negotiation processes, networking, scientific publishing, balance) as well as parlour conversations, lectures, and symposia to all female early career researchers.

The offer is complemented by the annual competence days for female early career researchers (Summer School/Spring School), a project in cooperation of the mentoring programmes ProScience and ProViae and Leuphana Graduate School. In addition to workshops and lectures, the Summer School also provides a platform for discussing gender codes in science and the resulting conditions for women’s different career paths.

Who are the ProScience and ProViae programmes aimed at?

To date, women are underrepresented in many areas of science. The higher the career and/or salary level, the lower the proportion of women. The mentoring programmes ProScience and ProViae, funded by the “Professorinnenprogramm” (BMBF), are intended to help reduce the underrepresentation of women in leadership and top positions. Targeted mentoring and coaching measures support highly qualified female academics on their way to professorships or to leadership positions outside the university.

The federal funding programme uses the term "women" within a binary understanding. In our approach, we interpret it more broadly and beyond binary gender categories. Persons who see themselves as female and/or locate themselves beyond binary categories are therefore also invited to seek individual counselling.

We consider it essential to take into account multiple gender identities and multiple kinds of discrimination and thus embrace a position beyond binary gender categories as well as an intersectional perspective. The Diversity Working Group of the Forum Mentoring, in which the ProScience and ProViae mentoring programmes are represented, reflects, among others, this ongoing and challenging process.