Gender Quotas in Scientific Decision-Making

National research funding bodies are key gatekeepers shaping the research agenda and future research careers.  A recent European expert report The Gender Challenge in Research Funding (EC 2009) highlighted how the decision-making boards of these funding bodies are far from gender balanced; eight out of 10 members of the boards of the funding bodies are male, and some all-male boards can still be found even in fields like medicine, with high female representation.  In the EU-27 and associated countries, Finland, Norway and Sweden are the only ones where the key funding bodies have been approaching or reached gender balance. Notably in all three countries the issue of gender in science has been on the research policy agenda for decades. All three also top global gender equality country rankings. The paper discusses the case of Finland, where the Gender Equality Act regulates since 1995 with a quota paragraph the composition of public committees in general, including the national Research Councils, the Academy of Finland. Both the political will and the science stakeholders influence the composition of the RCs since they are appointed by the Govern­­ment, after the Ministry of Education and Culture consultations with stakeholders who are requested to propose candidates. The RC boards are currently gender balanced. Noteworthy in the Finnish case is that a relatively high female RC board representation was reached long before the quota regulation, as early as some thirty years ago, due to the focused actions and demands of the national gender equality machinery. However, gender balance does not apply to the composition of the current RC advisory bodies and expert groups rating the funding applications -- in these the latest available figures show female representation to be less than a third