About IDUN

At NTNU's Faculty of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering, almost 13% of the professors are women. This is partly due to the fact that too few women are educated at master's level in STEM and partly that many women fall out of the career ladder. The BALANSE project IDUN addresses three main issues to improve gender balance: We recruit more women to all levels from Ph.D. to professor, limit the dropout rate of women and help increase the proportion of women in international research projects.

The central initiative in the project will be the employment of up to seven Professor-II candidates, one at each of the seven departments at the faculty. IDUN will provide training for these professors to become role models and mentors for 3-7 female mentees each. The project will provide training, career counseling, application writing courses and information on existing supportive work environment packages, which are already in place. IDUN's team works closely with all department heads and aims at supporting both, the female researchers and the top management.

IDUN began 1 August 2019 and will build on knowledge and experience from three gender equality projects at NTNU: weLead, the Girl project Ada, and the BALANCE project «Gender equality from below. Towards a gender-balanced NTNU 2025 ».

IDUN's goal is to become a best practice among the national BALANCE projects, but also an international example for systematic and strategic measures towards diversity and gender balance in academia.