Max Planck Society conducts bullying survey
In large parts of the publicly-funded science ecosystem in the STEM fields, I have a very strong impression that the pendulum has swung so far that women are now at a significant advantage over men as a result of affirmative action policies.  They should really not be complaining about discrimination.<p>For example, the DOC fellowship of the Austrian Academy of Sciences which funded my PhD was structured in such a way that the grant was split into two equal pots.  One pot took applications ONLY from women.  The other pot was enforcing 50% of the fellowships going to women.  That means: The rules stipulated that there was 3x as much funding available for women as there was for men, despite the fact that there were much fewer female applicants, so chances for a female to get funding were, by design, at least an order of magnitude higher than for a man.  -- This was the only publicly funded scholarship program in Austria that pays enough to study at, say, an ivy leage in the U.S. or something like that. --  On top of that they had great mentoring programmes and networking opportunities that were open ONLY to women, and nothing of the sort that men were welcome for.<p>Similar story told to me by my male cousin, working for a solar technology startup with close ties to an Austrian university and the Austrian science funding ecosystem: They had received public funding to hire some physicists, but some of the funding was earmarked so it could be used only for hiring women.  Hiring a woman proved to be a thing of impossibility, since they couldn&#x27;t find a single one that wanted to apply.  They ended up having to give back the funding.  An applicant could have had a job there, and all it would have taken was to  (a) be vaguely a physicist  (b) be female.  She didn&#x27;t need to be <i>good</i> or anything.  She just needed to show up, and the job would have been guaranteed to her, since, from the company&#x27;s POV, it was free money being left on the table to do anything else.<p>I know <i>a lot</i> of people working for research institutions being funded by the Austrian taxpayer.  They tend to all have really shitty careers, with one exception.  Guess what that exception was.  You guessed right: The one woman I know that travels in those circles.<p>I don&#x27;t know if things are as bad in Germany yet as they are in Austria, but women in the publicly-funded science ecosystem in the STEM fields complaining about discrimination at this point in history is simply outrageous.  If anything, men should be the ones complaining.