Join us for our next #SciMomChats webinar to explore whether there is a “right time” to have children while navigating an academic career–drawing both on research and the lived experiences of academic mothers.
📅 23 April
⏰ 10AM ET | 4PM CET
Register 👉 https://ow.ly/QWbY50YH32m
IMPACT OF PARENTHOOD ON UNIVERSITY EMPLOYMENT. Line graph shows how the probability of holding a research position changes from four years before to seven years after having children.
Becoming a parent is much more detrimental to women’s academic careers than it is to men’s
Read the full story: go.nature.com/4v4rxmQ
Many of us notice inappropriate behaviour at work, but do not always know how to respond. This session offers practical tools to act. Join Dr Pauline Gagnon for an Advanced Active Bystander Training.
📅 9 April, 14:00–18:00
📍 Huize Heyendael, Radboud University
Register 👉 www.ru.nl/en/about-us/...
You are invited to our roundtable: “Navigating Freedom, Sustainability & Gender Justice in Academia”. We will reflect and share experiences on urgent issues shaping the daily lives of women+ in academia.
Info & registration: www.ru.nl/en/about-us/...
On 10 March, we invite you to the "Shiny Failure" workshop with Stéfanie André.
Academic careers are not straight paths. Rejections, temporary contracts, care work: it is a balancing act. Let's talk openly about failure, solidarity, and self-kindness.
More info 👉 www.ru.nl/en/research/...
Just published: the @lnvh.nl Women Professors Monitor 2025!
View and download it here: shorturl.at/nU1ZW
The 2025 LNVH Women Professors Monitor is now available in English! Women now make up 29.9% of full professors in NL. An important milestone, though progress remains slow and uneven. The strong pool of women associate professors offers real potential for acceleration.
🔗 lnvh.nl/monitor2025
calendar icon showing the 18th of june, placed over hand painted flowers in LNVH colours blue and green. Text: June 18 Save The Date. LNVH Spring SYmposium 2026
We are pleased to announce that the next LNVH Spring Symposium will take place on June 18, 2025.
Details about the program, speakers, and location will be shared at a later moment. For now, we invite you to mark your calendar and stay tuned for further updates.
Looking forward to contributing a workshop at this year’s International Women’s Day at Radboud 💜
In “Caring, coping, and carrying on?” we will explore what constant caring does to the brain, and how resilience is learned, and sometimes stretched too far.
Join us on Tuesday, 10 March 2026 (12:30–17:00) at Chapel Berchmanianum to celebrate International Women’s Day ✨
An afternoon of inspiration & connection:
• Keynote on resilience & agency
• Theatre performance
• Interactive workshops (EN/NL)
• Networking drinks
Register: www.ru.nl/en/about-us/...
To celebrate #WomenAndGirlsInScienceDay #11F, we warmly invite you to our upcoming online panel!
Great speakers will discuss how to build inclusive, accessible, and empowering computational skills
Co-hosted by @psychopy.org
🗓️ Monday, February 23
🕐 13:00–14:30 CET
🔗 Register here: shorturl.at/Jqm4M
To commemorate Women's Month, we want to invite you to our upcoming online panel:
Building Inclusive Computational Skills 🛠️
🗓️ Monday Feb. 23
🕐 13:00-14:30 CET
🗣️@palencianoap.bsky.social @hailina.bsky.social @cecibaldoni.bsky.social
Registration here: shorturl.at/Jqm4M
Co-hosted by @psychopy.org
How do we navigate academic freedom, sustainability & gender justice in the university?
Join a roundtable to share experiences on:
• academic freedom & safety
• job insecurity
• invisible academic labour
• caregiving & life events
🗓 Thu 19 March 2026 | 12:20–13:20
📍 Refter Corner, Erasmus Building
📣Deadline extended! Applications are still open for the 2026 cohort of our Mentoring Program. Apply now to receive support and tailored career guidance from experienced mothers in STEMM on how to thrive in both your career and motherhood. Apply 👉 https://tinyurl.com/vshb3878
#MentoringProgram
So much work still to do to break the glass ceiling!
Analysis of millions of biomed & life science articles reveal that female-authored articles spend longer under review than comparable male-authored ones
@plosbiology.org
🧪 plos.io/4658FZN
LNVH is proud partner of NWO Insight Out, the national career event for women+ in STEM. Join us on February 12 for sessions on career development, leadership, visibility, and equity. Register now to connect through keynotes, workshops, and networking. www.nwoinsightout2026.nl
Evolution of the median time under review of articles with female first authors, male first authors, female corresponding authors, and male corresponding authors.
#Women are underrepresented in academia, especially in #STEMM fields, top institutions & in senior positions. Analysis of millions of biomed & life science articles reveal that female-authored articles spend longer under review than comparable male-authored ones @plosbiology.org 🧪 plos.io/4658FZN
Book review 📚 These women helped to shape quantum mechanics — it’s time to recognize them
go.nature.com/3Ls2yYu
Split-screen image showing two hands (man’s hand on the left and woman’s hand on the right) holding a payslip labelled ‘PAYSILP 2025.’ The left side, with a beige background, represents ‘For Him’ and shows ‘Paid up until 31 December’ with a green ‘PAID’ stamp. The right side, with a gray background, represents ‘For Her’ and shows ‘Paid up until 17 November’ with handwritten text ‘Thanks!’ Both sides list the same work position and same days worked, highlighting a pay gap.
#EUEqualPayDay marks an unfair truth: the EU gender pay gap is still 12%.
Our Roadmap for Women's Rights reinforces our commitment to:
🔹Equal pay
🔹Equal employment opportunities & adequate working conditions
🔹Work/life balance
🔗 link.europa.eu/FgwFK3
Are you interested in taking part in the Living Library? See the invitation below 👇
#SciMomJourney from Rachel James - neuroscience researcher, science editor & mother of three. Rachel’s journey highlights the challenges of parenting while navigating fixed-term contracts, career breaks, and part-time work. Read her journey 👇https://www.mothersinscience.com/journeys/rachel-james
Over a third of mothers in STEMM experience maternity bias, and fathers who share caregiving face stigma too. Follow our #BreakTheBiasSTEMM campaign to raise awareness & push for change–so no one has to choose between family or career. #MotherhoodPenalty #WomenInSTEMM #AcademicParents
Help make science more welcoming!
Join Pauline Gagnon for a hands-on Active Bystander workshop.
📅 Tue Oct 7 | ⏰ 9:00–14:00 | 📍 Huize Heyendael 00.18, Radboud University
🥗 Free lunch!
Open to all. Limited spots; register soon! 👉 www.ru.nl/en/about-us/...
🌍 Join us Tue Oct 7, 9:00–14:00 for a hands-on training with Pauline Gagnon: How to Become an Active Bystander. Learn tools to address bias & make science welcoming to all.
📍 Huize Heyendael 00.18 De Salon
🥗 Free lunch, limited spots; register soon!
www.ru.nl/en/about-us/...
Abstract: Under the banner of progress, products have been uncritically adopted or even imposed on users — in past centuries with tobacco and combustion engines, and in the 21st with social media. For these collective blunders, we now regret our involvement or apathy as scientists, and society struggles to put the genie back in the bottle. Currently, we are similarly entangled with artificial intelligence (AI) technology. For example, software updates are rolled out seamlessly and non-consensually, Microsoft Office is bundled with chatbots, and we, our students, and our employers have had no say, as it is not considered a valid position to reject AI technologies in our teaching and research. This is why in June 2025, we co-authored an Open Letter calling on our employers to reverse and rethink their stance on uncritically adopting AI technologies. In this position piece, we expound on why universities must take their role seriously toa) counter the technology industry’s marketing, hype, and harm; and to b) safeguard higher education, critical thinking, expertise, academic freedom, and scientific integrity. We include pointers to relevant work to further inform our colleagues.
Figure 1. A cartoon set theoretic view on various terms (see Table 1) used when discussing the superset AI (black outline, hatched background): LLMs are in orange; ANNs are in magenta; generative models are in blue; and finally, chatbots are in green. Where these intersect, the colours reflect that, e.g. generative adversarial network (GAN) and Boltzmann machine (BM) models are in the purple subset because they are both generative and ANNs. In the case of proprietary closed source models, e.g. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Apple’s Siri, we cannot verify their implementation and so academics can only make educated guesses (cf. Dingemanse 2025). Undefined terms used above: BERT (Devlin et al. 2019); AlexNet (Krizhevsky et al. 2017); A.L.I.C.E. (Wallace 2009); ELIZA (Weizenbaum 1966); Jabberwacky (Twist 2003); linear discriminant analysis (LDA); quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA).
Table 1. Below some of the typical terminological disarray is untangled. Importantly, none of these terms are orthogonal nor do they exclusively pick out the types of products we may wish to critique or proscribe.
Protecting the Ecosystem of Human Knowledge: Five Principles
Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia:
doi.org/10.5281/zeno...
We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity.
1/n
We’re so proud of our former board member Mariana! 🎉 Wishing her all the best for her PhD defense and looking forward to the fascinating mini-symposium she’s hosting 🌟
Rethinking women’s brain health — a Comment article by Julia Sacher & Ingo Bechmann
#neuroscience #neuroskyence
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
