Stuck in a Swiss Catch-22 for Equal Rights?

What happened?

Ironically, I received this reprimand at exactly the same time that the ETH was running a “Respect” campaign (external pagelinkcall_made) – something that I certainly felt was lacking.  After some careful consideration, I decided to formally protest this reprimand, which I considered to have been abusive, inappropriate, and unjustified.  It was in my opinion a rather heavy-handed attempt to intimidate me, I believe due to my refusal to support the dismissal of my colleague Professor Marcella Carollo, an action which I believed to be neither justified nor appropriate.   

After multiple legal steps requiring me to hire a lawyer, we ended up at the “Bundesverwaltungsgericht (BVG)”, the Federal Administrative Court, which deals with disputes with and within our governmental organizations. On the 29 June 2022, the BVG issued its judgement (external pagelinkcall_made), explaining that such a reprimand could not be disputed and must remain in my personnel file, even though I had immediately protested its incorrectness and inappropriateness.

Some of the Swiss press noticed this judgement [1], and astutely observed that the public had been given different reasons for my reprimand: the ETH Corporate Communications had claimed that the reprimand had been issued, not because of my interview in the Republik [2], but as a result of other personnel issues. With this statement, the ETH implied that there were other personnel problems that they were not allowed to talk about – an example of a now familiar technique of using “data privacy” to hide from public scrutiny. This kind of communication is an example of how an organization can effortlessly damage someone’s reputation. Neither justified, nor respectful, nor following any kind of best practices, in my opinion.

The BVG judgement also states – and thereby sets a standard – that it is quite alright, here in Switzerland, for an employer to use unilaterally produced, even one-sided minutes from an informal meeting, even if contested, to issue an official reprimand, which is indeed the first step on the path towards dismissal.  Since I am not actually being dismissed (at least not so far), there was, in the view of the Court, no damage done, and therefore no further steps were either necessary or allowed.

Of course, by the time one is actually dismissed, it is more than a little too late.

As the BVG decision is a public document, I can share this information (external pagelinkcall_made), along with the reprimand letter and the original one-sided minutes (Downloaddownloadvertical_align_bottom), as well as my request for corrections to these minutes (Downloaddownloadvertical_align_bottom).  I also give a summary of my 2-year-long effort within the ETH (Downloaddownloadvertical_align_bottom) to try to ensure that my colleague Professor Carollo received a fair due process.  This prolonged attempt to seek fair treatment followed all the "internal rules and guidelines of the ETH" as best as possible - unfortunately in vain.   

Only after ETH decided to proceed with the termination of Carollo in 2019, despite the explicit recommendation of the official Dismissal Review Committee that she not be dismissed, did I agree to the request of the Republik for an interview [2]. In that interview, I discussed my views about the governance issues at ETH including the lack of independent and effective grievance processes. I also used a layman’s meaning of the term "corruption", which got me into trouble with the lawyers of ETH – as it turns out, the Swiss legal definition of "corruption" is substantially narrower than the normal definition that one finds for example in Wikipedia – external pagehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption#Systemic_corruptioncall_made).

As it turns out, the BVG ruling from 14. April 2022 on Carollo’s appeal (external pagelink)call_made confirmed my own concerns. The Court judged that her dismissal had been “disproportionate and unjustified”. Despite this, however, the ETH was under no obligation to reinstate her, so she lost her tenured professorship (receiving instead damages of 8 months of salary), her active research group, her research projects developed over 25 years of dedicated work, and the last decade of her active career in astrophysics.

A female tenured professor still loses her position – even though the court judges the firing to be "disproportionate and unjustified" – how is this possible?

Sadly, this is our law in Switzerland. Even if a dismissal is deemed "disproportionate and unjustified" a tenured professor still loses her job. The only way to get the position reinstated is to prove that the dismissal was due to conflict or revenge, or based on gender discrimination. These are often almost impossible to prove. Proving gender discrimination with a single case is typically extremely difficult, particularly with no access to the details of other situations evidently handled differently within the organization. This important issue was addressed, but dismissed, in the court’s judgement (page 85, Section 12.6.1; see external pagelinkcall_made, where at the end there is access to the full 100 pages of the court case A-4744/2019 – in German only.  Note there is a lot of learning material about how we can better protect minorities against discrimination).

In its landmark 1999 report on gender issues in science, the number-one-ranked technical university in the world, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), clearly stated the difficulty of establishing gender discrimination from review of any single case:

"Often it is difficult to establish discrimination as a factor, because any one case, no matter how disturbing or aberrant, can usually be ascribed to its special circumstances. Thus, we need to develop safeguards to prevent, and promptly correct the experiences that together constitute gender discrimination" (MIT report 1999 [4], p. 6)

Switzerland, in 2022, still asks for the impossible. I try to stay positive, but I do believe we need real political measures in Switzerland to address this persistent problem. We have made insufficient progress with regards to women in leadership positions, something that is increasingly noticed internationally, as in a recent Economist article (Downloaddownload (PDF, 181 KB)vertical_align_bottom). This was also addressed in a “good-bye” article published by elleXX external page(link)call_made, written by a human rights lawyer and working mother after six years leaving Switzerland and her urgent call-to-action for all of us.

Let’s look at another example in Switzerland, the recent Urwyler case in medicine at the University of Bern (see attached a more detailed summary of her case [6]). On her way to becoming a professor, Dr. Natalie Urwyler wanted to improve the situation for women doctors during pregnancy. Instead, she was terminated, then went to court (in 2014), finally "prevailing" with a positive judgement – in 2018 (and at a personal cost of more than a half-million Swiss Francs). She did achieve the impossible, and convinced the court that she had suffered gender discrimination, as her dismissal was directly related to her pregnancy (a clear "woman issue").  She was indeed reinstated to her old position, but was nevertheless not allowed by her employer to resume her work!

And during these disputes, universities pay their legal fees from their budgets, funded ultimately by Swiss taxpayers’ money.  In both the Carollo and the Urwyler cases, there were no discernable negative consequences for the university or its leadership, despite their incorrect decisions. This lack of accountability of the leadership continues to surface as a crucial issue in the current academic culture [7]. In the meantime, those standing up for change risk punitive treatment and sidelining of their careers.

Together with other women professors at ETH Zurich and EPFL, we are trying to establish something similar to the inclusive excellence efforts from Harvard. In contrast to the women professors at MIT, we here continue to face a very uphill battle. This begins with "losing goodwill" at the university. Routine requests suddenly face non-routine delays, difficulties, and eventually a brick wall. This is something that I have experienced - particularly since my opposition to the Carollo termination. This has even negatively affected my research group – both the postdocs working hard to launch their own academic or industrials careers, and the Ph.D. students working to maximize their scientific results. However, I made the conscious decision to challenge this situation – after all, "if I, as a female senior science professor, cannot speak up strongly for change … who can?"  This is also a reason why I gave up my office and the highly successful attoclock machine, to ensure my group could continue to have the space to do their work [8]. Earlier in my career, this would have been much more difficult, and for anyone younger, their career could have been seriously damaged, endangering the already-challenging academic career path they face.

So - how can we achieve equality here - when we lose institutional support, or even get punished - for efforts to speak up to try to improve the situation for female academics?

Let me quote the excellent article by Ryan [9] "Good intentions are not enough to bring about change; nor are simple tallies, training programmes or unwarranted rosy views. Change requires sustained investment, appropriate incentives and evidence-backed interventions."

We need to join our efforts: "Now more than ever, the extent that women in positions of leadership are subjected to a double standard that is not present when male leaders are assessed should be a question every one of us … Recognizing the patterns and double standards is the first step in committing to fight and eliminate them." [10]

The current culture of informal, mostly male-dominated power networks, with inherent potential for gender bias, limited transparency and even less accountability in decisions and resource distribution, continues to negatively affect women in leadership positions, and discourages the next generation to step up into these leadership positions. My goal is to change this with better governance, accountability and transparency, and to remove what we have started to call "the gorilla glass ceiling" [11]. In the end, it is about culture in the workplace, and this includes power, resources and privileges. Having equal access for all groups, including women, minorities and outsiders, makes the whole organization stronger. Much stronger!

What are our recommendations to change the current situation with measurable results?

Accountability and transparency in resource distribution and in decision making is required to empower inclusive excellence. One important pitfall is to conflate scientific autonomy – something that is mostly considered sacrosanct - with management autonomy. The fact that each department and often each research group can operate at quite different management standards is a serious limitation. "Democratic decision making" sounds great, but with insufficient checks and balances, simple majority votes will often put a stop to sustainable culture change. And it can easily turn abusive against minorities and those who are not members of the "in-group" or "playing ball". This is not new, at least to students of history. Unsurprisingly, there is often resistance for change, as the current management culture typically finds that all is well and no change is required.   However, I know of many excellent colleagues, including many males, who are not comfortable with the current situation, and would welcome improvements, but are reluctant to speak up.

I do think this is a solvable problem that does not involve huge costs or radical overhaul of organizations. The United Kingdom, for example, has already demonstrated with the Juno program the ability to successfully change the work culture for minorities. The Juno initiative includes better mandatory training and workshops on unconscious bias, implemented at all levels from students to professors. Organizing and publishing surveys of issues important to women (professors) at the participating institutions has also been important. Previous surveys have highlighted that improving the work-place culture is a key concern of a large majority of all women academics.  A critical mass of female faculty is essential to change these dynamics [12].

On the long run, I believe that more efforts are required to change the culture in STEM fields, and that projects like Juno (external pagelinkcall_made) can be an excellent guide to achieve progress that is both rapid and sustainable. The Juno project was specially designed to improve the work culture in physics departments, and goes back to the idea of the Athena SWAN award (external pagelinkcall_made). The Juno project gives the additional motivation for a culture change with an award that is required to obtain public funds. In the project Juno, professors are welcome to help defining better governance procedures to improve – with independent checks, independent grievance procedures and appropriate oversight, and thus increased credibility – the existing culture of the university. We need real benefits for engaging on these issues, for both men and women.   

Many other professions have excellent female representation. Almost half of working physicians today are women and in other areas, too, around half of the skilled workers and university students are women. This could – and should - be about the same in other important STEM areas such as physics and computer science. Support by our culture and by our legal systems is typically necessary to achieve such socio-economic changes in society. And this ultimately requires fair and equitable treatment for those challenging the current situation both on resource distribution but also including media and communications.

Forty years ago, at the start of my physics career, I was absolutely convinced that a woman could achieve anything. Now, I am absolutely convinced there are still serious issues of inequality and discrimination that need to be addressed and improved. I am still an optimist – but I do want us to succeed in solving these issues and to see these changes still in my lifetime(!)

And this is my continuing call to action: listen, take this seriously, and let’s work together to make progress!