Dear all,

This is indeed a though topic. Female scientist encounter much less discriminations than do women in other professional fields.

I am 100% against a proposal of taking into account gender when recruiting personnel or designing delegates ... Too often, I have requests to participate in various councils or commissions set up by public institutions, just because I am a female and they are requested by law or whatever to balance genders in these commissions. This is not appropriate at all. People should be chosen because of their qualities and motivation, not because they have dark hair, green eyes, a membership in a political party or female attributes. What should rather be emphasised, is that girls and boys should have the same education, that stereotypes regarding female and male "professions" or studies should disappear, that the organisation and combination of profession and family should be facilitated for all.

On the other hand, regarding the aspects of human health as they relate to the VPH, we MUST show that we are aware of gender differences and that we will take these into account. Take osteoporosis, for instance.

With kind regards

Vero

-----Original Message-----
From: sintjans
Sent: lundi 29 mai 2006 9:45
To: The STEP Action public forum
Subject:re:Roadmap: gender issues among scientists?


Dear Kirstine,

>At the recent Conference 1 in Brussels where the roadmap was discussed,
>gender issues was touched upon very briefly. Briefly I believe because
>of a strong statement by one participant agains affirmative action. As a
>female physicist, I agree that strict affirmative action is not for the
>better.

I'm a male, so of course I'm might not be very relevant for that kind of discussion.

I do think that it is very wise from you all female researchers to be against affirmative actions (this way you show you are wiser than your male colleagues).

>there are still many subtle differences in the way male and female

.. being against affirmative actions do not mean in my eyes that you implicitly accept de facto the "many subtle differences" in the current selection of researchers you are reporting.

I would advice the White Paper to claim that our group is "against positive discrimination, ALL positive discrimination including those of men" (better formulated of course).

I guess the Commission is already aware of that problem (see the many questionnaires sent to most of us in the past about gender issues), but it might be a good idea for our White Paper to repeat that problem if our female colleagues feels it is necessary.

Can I suggest our female colleagues to start a discussion between them in order to find a consensus about what they feel should appear in the Gender Issue topic of the White Paper on that particular issue? Maybe you can create a dedicated forum on BiomedTown?

Bye for now,

Serge

PS: by the way, the ratio of female students in Medicine in our university is almost 3 females for 1 male ... so, this problem should be solved automatically on a long term ... at least in Medicine.

*****************************************
Serge VAN SINT JAN, Ph.D.
Associate Professor, Marie Curie Fellow
Department of Anatomy (CP 619)
Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB)
Lennik Street 808
1070 Brussels - Belgium
Phone: +32-2-555-6325 (-6376)
Fax: +32-2-555-6378
Email: sintjans@ulb.ac.be
LAB website: http://homepages.ulb.ac.be/~anatemb



original: http://www.biomedtown.org/biomed_town/VPH/StepPublic/step-public/592235369966
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