With the end of the Elise Richter Fellowship in 2025, the FWF has followed an international trend among scientific funding agencies away from women-specific programs. However, the so-called “leaky pipeline” remains an ongoing issue, indicating that structural inequalities persist. Continued and active dialogue is therefore necessary to identify measures that can foster change in a fair and equitable manner.
Both the newly established ASTRA program and the longer-standing ESPRIT program include women’s quotas. At the same time, such quotas remain a controversial policy instrument and are often met with polarized or critical opinions.
In this context, ERN chair woman Dr. Karen Kastenhofer sat down with science communicator Dr. Charlotte Zaij to discuss the necessity of women’s quotas, as well as structural bias and inequality on her podcast Die Wissen schafft, episode 23.
