Dewis Lunch meeting

Who am I?• Liedewij Laan, • born in 1980 in Hengelo the Netherlands• Studied Applied Physics at Twente University in

Enschede1999-2004

• Master project at FOM Institute AMOLF (with Marileen Dogterom) in Amsterdam

2004-2005• PhD project in biophysics also at FOM Institute

AMOLF (with Marileen Dogterom) in Amsterdam 2005-2009

• Post-doc at Harvard University in Cell Biology and Genetics, with Andrew Murray in Cambridge MA

2009-2014• Assistant professor (tenure track), Bionanoscience

at the Kavli Institute for Nanoscience, Applied Sciences

2014-now Laanlab.tudelft.nl

2004

Harvard University• Much more awareness of implicit biases than in the

Netherlands, even though in my experience the biases are much weaker.

• Professors (at least where I was) are strongly encouraged to take the implicit bias test (developed at Harvard)

• https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/Study?tid=-1• Harvard actively recruits female professors• Also in graduate programs they actively recruit girls (for

example typically 40% of the PhD students in physics are women)

• What about: “you are only here because of positive discrimination, it is unfair”

• My experience: more positive discrimination, less comments.

TU Delft• Back to the Netherlands• What did I notice:– Still strong bias that a scientist is an old white male:

1) Wetenschaps visie2) Complete lack of

maternity/parental policy in the tenure track (because they forgot), clearly in the current policy the default is a man who works full time.

3) In the US typically you get one extra year in your tenure track for every baby.

4) ERC/NOW gives you 1.5 years

Questions?