University of Hamburg Equal Opportunity Prize

Worth €10,000 this year’s prize for outstanding, visible, and sustainable activities promoting equal opportunity in the areas of gender, diversity, and work-life balance goes to EXIST Women, which is being implemented by a team from the University of Hamburg Business School and the Knowledge Exchange Agency.

EXIST Women gives women at the University of Hamburg who are interested in starting their own business or have an affinity for entrepreneurship the opportunity to familiarise themselves with the topics of starting a business and professional independence at an early stage. As part of a 12-month qualification programme, EXIST Women offers individual coaching through the university's excellent start-up network and the Hanseatic City of Hamburg, entrepreneurial support from at least one mentor, and a one-time grant of €2,000 gross (e.g. for coaching or travel expenses). The University of Hamburg plans to award another 10 scholarships as part of the EXIST Women funding programme in 2025. The prize money will be used to offer courses on the topic of ‘negotiation management’ for female students from all faculties in the Master's and PhD programmes.

Worth €10,000 this year’s prize for outstanding, visible, and sustainable activities promoting equal opportunity in the areas of gender, diversity, and work-life balance goes to the Jura Erstakademiker*innen-Stammtisch and FLINTA§TISCH.

This regular get-together provides students from nonacademic families with a platform for exchanging experiences and mutual support. It responds to education inequalities and social disparities in the field of law. The Arbeiterkind.de initiative came up with the idea for regular group meetings for students from nonacademic families. Flinta§tisch (Flinta§stic) stands for the feminist law community with a strong focus on intersectionality— welcoming all FLINTA*, women, lesbian, inter, non-binary,trans, and agender people. The FLINTA table is open to all students, research associates, doctoral researchers, teaching staff, and administrative staff.

Worth €10,000, this year’s prize for outstanding, visible, and sustainable activities promoting equal opportunity in the areas of gender, diversity, and work-life balance goes to the dynaMENT mentoring program: Mentoring for Women in the Natural Sciences.

dynaMENT supports and promotes future female leaders in the natural sciences, and strengthens the University’s equal opportunity policy, for example on the research campus in Hamburg-Bahrenfeld. The program includes workshops, one-on-one coaching sessions offered by experienced mentors, and networking events tailored to the needs of the female researchers. The program aims to retain women at the University, in academia, and in Hamburg as a place of scientific pursuit. dynaMENT is politically committed to creating gender-equitable structures, making existing hierarchies and dependencies more transparent, or overcoming them to increase the visibility of qualified women in the natural sciences.

In 2022, the prize for outstanding, visible, and sustainable activities at Universität Hamburg went to the initiative Bildung – Macht – Rassismus (education—power—racism).

The initiative aims to strengthen anti-racist ways of thinking and action in everyday university life and to promote a constructive approach to diversity. Its events provide opportunities to address structural and institutional inequalities in higher education. The initiative is organized by a team of students, doctoral candidates, and research associates, primarily from Universität Hamburg, but also from the Hamburg University of Applied Sciences (HAW) as well as non-students and professionals— all of them volunteers who distinguish themselves through their extraordinary commitment.

In 2021, the Prize for outstanding, visible, and sustainable activities at Universität Hamburg went to the Faculty of Law’s equal opportunity team for their S:TEREO project on (gender-)role stereotypes in law education.

The project aims to establish sustainable gender- and diversity-sensitive as well as discrimination-free teaching at the Faculty of Law. Its main focus is a digital complaint’s office, which enables students to actively participate in the project and anonymously draw attention to discriminatory teaching materials. Based on these reports, the equal opportunity team will support teaching staff in designing gender-appropriate and non-discriminatory legal training cases. The implementation of gender-inclusive language in law teaching materials also forms part of the Faculty of Law’s Equal Opportunity Plan.

The 2020 Equal Opportunity Prize has gone to 3 projects involved in equal opportunity work at Universität Hamburg.

Physik-Projekt-Tage organizes workshops that are designed to inspire students in the final 2 years of secondary education to engage with topics related to physics, the natural sciences, and technical subjects. The 4-day workshops have taken place since 2018 and include an extensive supporting program. The project makes an outstanding contribution toward increasing the proportion of women in physics and other disciplines within the natural sciences. Physik-Projekt-Tage has won the Equal Opportunity Prize worth €10,000.

Two nonmonetary prizes were also awarded. The first has gone to the project BWLternzeitmodell (Faculty of Business Administration parental leave model), which aims to improve the balance between family life and work life while ensuring planning security for positions attached to professorships. The second nonmonetary prize was awarded to the Faculty of Law’s equal opportunity team for its extraordinary commitment and efforts toward gender equality issues.

The 2019 prize for outstanding, visible, and sustainable commitment to equal opportunity in the areas of gender justice, diversity, and the compatibility of work or study and family life has been awarded to the Career Center at Universität Hamburg. In line with the motto “Looking ahead with courage and confidence,” the Career Center staff offers guidance to roughly 6,000 students annually as they transition from their studies to work or doctoral studies. In all of the workshops and talks that it offers, the Career Center consistently integrates gender and diversity themes and advocates for gender justice, diversity, and the compatibility of family and studies or work, whether at a structural or individual level.

Awarding of the Equal Opportunity Prize in June 2019 (Source: UHH/Saint Pere)

In her awards ceremony speech, Gabriele Löschper, the dean and long-standing Career Center pioneer, looked back at the Center’s history, from its beginnings in 2001 as the Women’s Career Center to its opening in 2007 as a general career center. This did not simply mean that it opened its doors to all genders; “rather,” said Löschper, “it clearly and decidedly focused both then and now on gender or, more generally, diversity, as we would express it today.”

She emphasized how important it is for the University to offer a range of educational opportunities that allows university graduates to assume responsible roles in society and to make sound decisions about these. The Career Center, said Löschper, meets this challenge “in prize-worthy fashion.” She also stressed that, in addition to providing guidance to students, the Career Center contributes significantly to structural change: “The staff places equal value on dialog with industry, and helping to incorporate diversity in public discourse and strengthen it through new ideas.”

Gabriele Löschper concluded her congratulatory speech with the wish that the staff of the Career Center maintain “its exemplary courage and contagious confidence.” She also expressed best wishes for the next 82 years, when the Career Center can celebrate its 100th anniversary.

Universität Hamburg has awarded the Equal Opportunity Prize 2018 to the organizational team of the Mildred Dresselhaus Guest Professorship Program in the CUI cluster of excellence in recognition of their commitment to empowering (early career) female researchers in physics, a commitment that positively affects the entire scientific community.

The guest professorship program is named after Mildred Dresselhaus, a professor of physics and electrical engineering († 2017) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and recipient of numerous distinctions. The program is one of the University’s central measures to promote women in the CUI cluster of excellence. Every year, it awards a prize to 2 outstanding (inter)national female researchers (senior and junior recipients) which includes a research stay in Hamburg for each recipient. Ten female researchers have received the award since the founding of the cluster in 2012. They conduct research with colleagues at the CUI and continue this research when the program ends, enriching the scientific community with their outstanding expertise. This award also confers greater visibility. Recipients act as strong role models and support equal opportunity measures at the research campus Bahrenfeld and beyond.

The Mildred Dresselhaus Program is, therefore, a shining example of how to link excellent research with focused equal opportunity efforts.

See press release

The Equal Opportunity Prize 2017 (first awarded in 1997 and previously known as the Women’s Advancement Prize) has been awarded to Universität Hamburg for the second time. The award of €10,000 was shared equally between joint prize-winners Prof. Dr. Nora Markland and her team at the Refugee Law Clinic and Prof. Dr. Martina Neuburger, who leads the Critical Geographies of Global Inequalities research group. The judges were especially impressed by the prizewinning teams’ extraordinary commitment to creating equal opportunities for refugees in the university environment and in their everyday lives.

The Refugee Law Clinic is made up of law students who have undergone an innovative form of legal training, incorporating relevant aspects of legal practice from the fields of asylum and immigration law. Through this, they have gained particular skills in working with diversity and avoiding discriminatory practices, and in taking on social responsibility. The Refugee Law Clinic team, under the leadership of Professor Nora Markard, helps to empower people seeking legal advice who may be subject to a number of disadvantages.

Through her teaching and research activities, Martina Neuburger, a professor at Universität Hamburg, promotes easier access to university for people who do not hold a standard qualification, for example because their qualifications have been awarded abroad or are not academically recognized. She helps identify creative solutions to increase flexibility in the workplace while addressing diversity requirements and incorporating discourse on racism awareness, diversity, and gender in the university environment. In this way, she helps to raise awareness of these subjects among students and faculty members. Her research and teaching activities highlight feminist/decolonial theory and consider the dynamics of power in empirical research, drawing attention to local practices of resistance in everyday life.