Gender equality

All measures to balance gender relations in science and administration are implemented by the staff unit in close cooperation with the Equal Opportunities Officer at TU Dortmund University.

Further information on the work of the central Equal Opportunities Officer and the Equal Opportunities Office can be found on the website of the Equal Opportunities Office.

The staff unit advises on:

• Research proposals: in collaboration with the Research Funding Unit, the unit advises on the submission of proposals, in particular on the aspects of diversity and equal opportunities. The unit makes suggestions on how to promote diversity, equal opportunities and gender parity in research projects. Further information can be found in this overview and in the service portal.

• Accreditation of degree programs: the checklist developed by the Gender Studies working group at TU Dortmund University serves as a basis for the review of accreditation applications. The staff unit, the central Equal Opportunities Officer and the Department of University Development and Organization work closely together to integrate equal opportunities and diversity aspects into this process.

• Use of equal opportunity funds in DFG projects: the staff unit advises DFG projects on the possibilities of using equal opportunity funds and designs special equal opportunity projects for SFB/TR.

The research-oriented gender equality standards of the German Research Foundation were adopted back in 2008 with the central aim of significantly increasing the proportion of women at all academic career levels. The cascade model served as a guiding principle: the targets for the proportion of women at each academic career level are derived from the proportion of women at the qualification level directly below.

A DFG working group evaluated the equality concepts submitted by the member institutions and monitored progress. TU Dortmund University was placed in the top group.

On 28.06.2023, the DFG General Assembly adopted the guidelines for an integrated report on the DFG's expanded research-oriented equality and diversity standards for the 2022 - 2025 reporting cycle. The universities submitted an integrative report of up to ten pages to the DFG in September 2024.

Reports

According to the NRW State Equal Opportunities Act of 06.12.2016, all units at universities with more than 20 employees are obliged to develop and update an equal opportunities concept. The staff unit is responsible for the process management of the equality concepts of the 17 departments and institutions of TU Dortmund University. You can find an overview of the process here.

The equality concepts of the departments and institutions can be found here.

In Section 37a of the NRW Higher Education Act of 16.09.2014, the NRW state government introduced the gender equality quota as an instrument to ensure equal opportunities for women and men when appointing professors. These equality quotas are set for three years in an internal university dialog process between the Rectorate, departments and equal opportunities officers. The staff unit coordinates this process.

We use gender-equitable language. To this end, TU Dortmund University issued a recommendation on 21.06.2021, which also contains information on the use of English.TU Dortmund University recommendations on gender-equitable language

Information on gender-equitable wording can be found in the gender dictionary and in the recommendations for action for gender diversity at universities - bukof. You can find another gender dictionary on the Sprachnudel page. This contains almost 6,500 terms with various examples of possible gender types, e.g. female word forms, gender-neutral words, different spellings. As a general dictionary, it also contains synonyms, new word creations and current colloquial words.