Equality between women and men affects all areas of society. Sweden has made significant progress in creating the same formal conditions and requirements for women and men. In practice, however, there are still major inequities between men and women.

The government believes that the proportion of women in Swedish research must continue to increase. The small percentage of women in high-level academic posts demonstrates that Sweden has a long way to go before achieving equality between the sexes in research. To keep women in the academic world, they must be given the same opportunities for academic careers as men.

In order to achieve greater gender equality in higher education, institutions of higher education may apply positive discrimination when recruiting staff to graduate schools and to other positions. This means that when competing applicants have equal or nearly equal qualifications, preference may be given to applicants of the underrepresented sex. In addition, supervisors in postgraduate studies will be given training in gender equality and gender perspective issues.

Research ethics of growing importance

The great importance of science and technology to society and its evolution makes research ethics an issue of major interest to the general public. Research raises many ethical issues. For example, its methods may be ethically problematic because they involve experiments on humans or animals or be based on combining sensitive individual data. One example is the extensive debate about the ethics of stem cell research. Other ethical considerations are the matters of objectivity and expertise in evaluating research and assessing societal problems. The government believes that researchers must enjoy great freedom in their work, especially when choosing what scientific or scholarly problems to focus on. At the same time, the research community must be open to discussions with the general public on the problems selected and the application of research findings.

One arena for these discussions is the Research Forum, established in 2001 at the same time as the new research funding system. The purpose of the Forum is to strengthen dialogue and collaboration between researchers, research financiers, the general public and others.

A new central agency for research ethics was established in 2004. It decides upon appeals about research ethics received by local ethics boards.

This text is published on this site with the approval from the Swedish Institute