EQUALITY GUIdE - KU Leuven

Chapter 2 ! Career paths: recruitment ! promotion ! dismissal 111
4.4. Instrument and case study results
4.4.1. Instrument: ‘Survey UGender’
For the instrument: see Tool Annex.
The survey started with questions about the respondents’ background (gender, faculty,
statute etc). These were followed by five survey parts about aspects that are important
in career development: (1) career counselling and mentoring, (2) networks, (3) promotion,
(4) meetings and (5) the combination of work and family/private life. Statements
about UGent staff members were also presented to the respondents, and the desirability
of potential policy advice was checked. The introduction to the survey (see Tool
Annex) underlined the importance of having all staff members cooperate in the formulation
of well-founded policy advices. It was also stressed that the responses were personal
and would be kept strictly confidential. The survey could be stopped at any moment
and finished at a later time. At the beginning of the new academic year (1 October
2006), everyone who had not yet responded to the survey received a reminder e-
mail (see Tool Annex). The survey was closed on October 15 th .
By means of this survey the entire population, namely everyone working at UGent in
August 2006, received the opportunity to elaborate on their personal career at UGent.
The research population consisted of all academic staff members (AP) and all administrative
and technical staff members (ATP) of Ghent University. E-mail invitations were
sent to all 6.152 contractual and statutory UGent staff members. 44% ! 2.678 members
of staff ! filled out the survey. Given the size of the survey (116 questions), this
was considered a good response rate. The average completion time was 32 minutes.
The survey statistics indicated that a third of the panel did not see the e-mail invitation.
This may have been partly caused by spam filters. If this is taken into account and
when looked solely at the staff members who did see the e-mail invitation, the response
rate is much higher: within the group that looked at the e-mail invitation, 67%
filled out the survey. Differences in non-response were found. In comparison to men,
women were more willing to respond to the survey. Secondly, a higher response rate
for ATP members compared to AP members was found. This selective non-response
was corrected by reweighing the data on the basis of the variables ‘sex’ and ‘statute
group’. The survey responses were processed and analysed with the statistical programme
SPSS (version SPSS 15.0.1). Descriptive statistics were used to summarize the
results.
4.4.2. Case study results
4.4.2.1. Do gender-related problems exist at UGent?
The survey part ‘Statements about staff members of UGent’ was used to examine