On Thursday, we had the privilege of hosting a Coffee Lecture with Prof. Dr. Daniela Rupp. Her research explores light-matter interactions and ultrafast light-driven dynamics in nanoscale particles.
Here are some impressions from her talk entitled “Science, Bias, and Belonging – Reflections from a Physicist.“ A big thank you to Prof. Rupp for sharing her thoughts and experiences with us!
Here are some impressions from this October’s Coffee Lecture with Professor Sarah Zerbes, where she talked about the struggles in the life of a mathematician. It was a truly engaging lecture and the first one made available for people to attend with Zoom.
In May, Prof. Dr. Özlem İmamoğlu presented a Coffee Lecture in the form of a Q&A session. We had very thoughtful conversations about the issues present for women in academia which she mixed with talking about her own experiences and giving us personal insights.
At the end of April, we hosted a Coffee Lecture in the form of a presentation from Dr. Sara Kališnik Hintz. She’s a senior scientist at the Department of Mathematics at ETH, and as such could provide us with invaluable knowledge of the social problems still present in STEM fields. We thank her for her time and everyone for coming!
The following is our article published in the FS25.1 issue of VAMP on the topic of the leaky pipeline:
Friendly, interesting, smart, always holding out a helping hand – whenever you move to a new university, those are the traits you’re looking for in your new professors. My BFF is our linear algebra teacher; her teaching style and character have played a huge part in getting me interested in that field. And the friendship is everlasting – unlike most women professors at ETH, her long-time employment is guaranteed with a full professorship. While our school’s proportion of female professors might appear somewhat impressive if we only look at assistant professors – 39.4 % in 2023 [1], this number only shows half of the story. This statistic among full-time (associate and full) professors is significantly lower. What exactly is the problem, how has the ETH fared against it, and has 2024 been a disappointing year for new friendships?
Let’s start with some good news: On March the sixth, the ETH Board introduced their 12 new professors [2], and among them is a fresh face in D PHYS – Dr Diana Prado Lopes Aude Craik. Our two department’s only new appointee is an MIT and Oxford graduate, a science communicator and a researcher on quantum computation, trapped ions, and potential dark matter bosons [2] [3]. She’s just one of 5 new women appointed by the ETH. This kind of ratio – 41.7% might seem somewhat progressive, and would be seen as such by the ETH. In 2020, 39.6% of newly appointed professors were women, which the board would later proudly proclaim as a “gratifyingly high” number. [4]
However, this statistic is only put in proper context when we look strictly at full-time professorships. Despite women making up 44% of new hires in 2024 [5][6][7][8][9], when we look at newly hired full and associate professors, the number drops to a significantly more embarrassing 31.7%. This is despite the fact that women are, as mentioned earlier, even less prominent in that group. The proportion of female professors in full-time roles is 17.8% in the whole of ETH, and an astonishing 10% in the maths and physics departments. [10] This means that women in our student body are horribly underrepresented – while every one of us can easily notice that there is a strong imbalance in how many women visit our lectures, women with full professorships have a significantly lower proportion than at any other academic level in our departments, with the only exception being senior and other scientific assistants, of whom 14% were women in 2023. [10]
That isn’t to say that there is no reason to be positive – while it’s easy to, say, compare ETH and UZH statistics of new appointments [11] and complain that, unlike the UZH, we aren’t able to reach the point where we are able to appoint more women than men in professor roles, it is true that we as a society are still handicapped when approaching the issue – women are still generally underrepresented in STEM, partially through societal biases and made significantly worse with the leaky pipeline phenomenon (one which Phi:male is currently trying to address.) With that context, you might say that the rate of progress isn’t the worst possible – the line is still going up, even if slowly.
But I’d argue that we can be more ambitious. 2023 was another year where looking at the headline statistics wouldn’t tell you everything about the ETH’s policy on women. Among the newly hired professors, meaning those who come from outside of the ETH domain, a landmark 67% were women, and an even better 80% of full and associate professors were. [10] If we want new students, not the next generations of students, to study at a school of the 21st century, we should loudly and proudly celebrate that number and carry that momentum forward. It is with that the aforementioned drop to 31.7% in the following year makes 2024 feel terribly disappointing, revealing 2023 to have been more of a fluke than a new standard. And the current standard isn’t impressive – the overall number of female professors at ETH is only increasing at roughly 1 percentage point per year. [10] That momentum is, of course, also destined to stagger if hiring practices don’t change: the more women we have total, the more outgoing professors will be female, slowing the percentage rise down.
And it’s important to remember why this matters: Hiring practices based on inclusive excellence will lead to a better functioning relationship between the professors, stronger synergy between the lecturers and their students, and an overall higher teaching quality at our school. It is worth remembering that the low number of women in STEM fields does not imply that there are fewer brilliant female professors – as the academic journey is unfortunately still significantly harder for women, it means that those who will have made it to the top have already gone through a strict selection process. And these beneficial effects will fuel a positive feedback loop: one of the ways in which effects such as the leaky pipeline can be mitigated is the promotion of women to higher educational roles. Strong role models can serve as excellent motivators, but more crucially, they will be responsible for promoting the idea of women at higher levels in STEM in and of themselves.
The ETH has proven that they can make fast progress in the past. What you might not realise today is that the first female professor at the school (Flora Ruchat Roncati) was only appointed in 1985; at D MATH, the first female professor (Sara van de Geer) was only hired in my birth year – 2005. But our group of besties still has a strong gender imbalance, especially when we laser in on the BFFs hired here for longer. Despite the ETH Board’s enthusiasm, progress could be significantly faster. So while we welcome our new professors with open arms, let’s keep in mind what and where we can improve.
If you are interested in being part of this change, why don’t you join Phi:male? With our current focus being the leaky pipeline at the Maths and Physics Departments, we are also organising social events and regular Coffee Lectures with interesting people from STEM fields. At the Lectures, speakers share their experiences with discrimination and inequality from their academic career and discuss how we can move forward. Come to one of our meetings or get to know us at the next Midweek Mingle on the 15th of April!
Works cited
1. Staff by function [Internet]. ETH-PDF_2023_v3_FINAL_EN.indd. ETH Zürich; [cited 2025 Mar 10]. Available from: ethz.ch/content/dam/ethz/main/eth-zurich/Informationsmaterial/GB23/PDF-Downloads/GB23-eth-zuerich-personalbestand_EN.pdf
2. Editorial Team. Twelve professors appointed [Internet]. ETH Zurich News & Events. 2025 [cited 2025 Mar 10]. Available from: ethz.ch/en/news-and-events/eth-news/news/2025/03/new-appointments-at-eth-zurich.html
3. Prado Lopes Aude Craik D. Diana Prado Lopes Aude Craik [Internet]. Loop. [cited 2025 Mar 10]. Available from: https://loop.frontiersin.org/people/308856/bio
4. Baumann P-P. Record number of female professors appointed – eth-rat [Internet]. ETH BOARD. 2021 [cited 2025 Mar 10]. Available from: ethrat.ch/en/record-number-of-female-professors-appointed/
5. Redaktion. Neun Professorinnen und Professoren ernannt [Internet]. ETH Zürich News & Veranstaltungen. 2024 [cited 2025 Mar 10]. Available from: ethz.ch/de/news-und-veranstaltungen/eth-news/news/2024/12/neun-professorinnen-und-professoren-ernannt.html
6. Redaktion. Fünfzehn Professorinnen und Professoren Ernannt [Internet]. ETH Zürich News & Veranstaltungen. 2024 [cited 2025 Mar 10]. Available from: ethz.ch/de/news-und-veranstaltungen/eth-news/news/2024/09/fuenfzehn-professorinnen-und-professoren-ernannt.html
7. Redaktion. Sechs Professorinnen und Professoren Ernannt [Internet]. ETH Zürich News & Veranstaltungen. 2024 [cited 2025 Mar 10]. Available from: ethz.ch/de/news-und-veranstaltungen/eth-news/news/2024/07/sechs-professorinnen-und-professoren-ernannt.html
8. Redaktion. Zwölf Professorinnen und Professoren Ernannt [Internet]. ETH Zürich News & Veranstaltungen. 2024 [cited 2025 Mar 10]. Available from: ethz.ch/de/news-und-veranstaltungen/eth-news/news/2024/05/zwoelf-professorinnen-und-professoren-ernannt.html
9. Redaktion. Neun Professorinnen und Professoren Ernannt [Internet]. ETH Zürich News & Veranstaltungen. 2024 [cited 2025 Mar 10]. Available from: ethz.ch/de/news-und-veranstaltungen/eth-news/news/2024/03/neun-professorinnen-und-professoren-ernannt.html
10. ETH Diversity. Equality Monitoring [Internet]. ETH Zürich Staffnet. [cited 2025 Mar 10]. Available from: ethz.ch/staffnet/en/employment-and-work/working-environment/diversity/monitoring-and-studies/equality-monitoring.html
11. Huber N. Women in the majority for the first time [Internet]. UZH News. 2022 [cited 2025 Mar 10]. Available from: www.news.uzh.ch/en/articles/2022/professorial-appointments.html
On the 4th of December, Prof. Dr. Ursula Keller joined us to speak at a Coffee Lecture She discussed her academic story as a student, the first female Physics professor at ETH and the founding president of the Women Professors Forum at ETH. Her presentation discussed both systemic and societal struggles for women in STEM fields as evident from research and her own experiences.
She kindly allowed us to upload the slides from her presentation as well as well as a research article she discussed:
Last November, we had the pleasure of hosting a Coffee Lecture with CERN based particle physicist and ETH professor Annapaola de Cosa. The focus was life as a woman in STEM, but she also told us about her and her team’s research on dark matter. The talk was filled with fascinating and useful information as well as advice for students and future researchers.
In November 2024, we co-hosted a special event by Prof. Sarah Zerbes at Student Project House in collaboration with thebookclub. In the talk, entitled “Latin Texts in Modern Times,” she talked about her passion for the language, how it evolved and how it continues to exist today. We’d like to thank her for her knowledge, her book recommendations, and to thanks everyone else who visited this spectacularly well visited event and who stayed around afterwards!
On May 23rd, we organised a Coffee Lecture with Prof. Ilaria Zardo from the University of Basel. There, she is the head of the Nano Technology Center. As a researcher, she has been awarded the Emmy Noether Distinction of the European Physical Society.
In her talk, she discussed the very important topic of managing family in academia and addressed societal norms, expectations and her personal experience. She also presented research on this topic and gave us both a realistic and optimistic outlook.
On May 10th 2024, we had the pleasure of hosting a coffee lecture with Professor Francesca Da Lio. The topic was “What makes a career in mathematics so special?” We’re grateful for her telling us about her story and for her insights, as well as the questions from everyone who attended!
