Suche
Mein Konto
Bertha Ottenstein Prize: Award for equality and diversity in Freiburg!
On March 8, 2025, the University of Freiburg will award the Bertha Ottenstein Prize for outstanding projects in gender and diversity research.
Bertha Ottenstein Prize: Award for equality and diversity in Freiburg!
Today, March 8, 2025, the University of Freiburg is awarding the renowned Bertha Ottenstein Prize. This prize, which is endowed with 5,000 euros, honors outstanding achievements in the area of equality and diversity. The prize is awarded not only to individuals, but also to groups or organizational units and particularly honors scientific work that deals with gender and diversity research as well as teaching concepts and further training offers on these topics. Projects that have a clear diversity dimension in terms of gender are also welcome, as the award has a long history as a women's advancement award uni-freiburg.de highlights.
After the call for proposals, the projects must not be older than two years. In special cases, however, ongoing or planned projects that will be realized with the prize money can also be considered. The Bertha Ottenstein Prize is therefore an important incentive for students, doctoral candidates and employees of the university to contribute their innovative ideas and concepts for equality.
Kite mentoring awarded
This year the prize is awarded to the successful women's support program kite-mentoring. This program, which is awarded in collaboration with the Justitia Mentoring Program, has been supporting female scientists in the natural and life sciences for over a decade and falls under the category of outstanding projects in the area of equality and the advancement of women news.vm.uni-freiburg.de.
Kite-mentoring promotes the strategic career development of women in the doctoral and postdoc phase and offers a comprehensive range of support, including mentoring, training, networking and coaching. Over 300 mentees and alumnae have already been connected through this program, underscoring the importance of such initiatives for scientific progress and equal opportunities. The award highlights the important role that funding programs such as kite-mentoring play in increasing the proportion of women in science.
Equality challenges and programs
Despite the decreased proportion of women in higher academic positions, the path to equality in science remains a central issue. Currently, the proportion of women among doctoral students is 46%, 37% among postdoctoral candidates and only 28% among professors. These numbers illustrate the phenomenon of the “leaky pipeline”. bmbf.de describes and would like to initiate current funding programs, such as the federal and state women's professor program. It is intended to ensure that the proportion of women at each career level corresponds to that of the previous level.
In this context, the BMBF is implementing measures in the “Diversity at German Universities” initiative, which runs from 2022-2024 and is intended to strengthen diversity in science. Other programs such as Girls' Day also promote stereotype-free career orientation for schoolgirls and are intended to help increase the proportion of women in MINT courses.
When it comes to the visibility of women in science, it shows that women received only 6.7% of Nobel Prizes from 1901 to 2023. Nevertheless, there are positive developments in the MINT field, where the proportion of women among students has increased from 19.5% in 1977 to 32.4% in 2022. It remains an important task to integrate gender aspects into research and innovation in order to achieve excellent results and sustainably promote equality.