Gender Equality, Family and Diversity

Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf (HHU) places particular value on equal rights and opportunities. That is why the university actively advocates an increase in the number of women at the university, for example through special training measures or mentoring programmes for young female researchers. A family-­friendly orientation is an increasingly important component of our university’s philosophy and has therefore been systematically anchored in all areas of the university. Family‐friendly personnel policy for students and staff at HHU is self-­evident for us and being consistently further developed.

This is the reason why HHU has been awarded the label as “Family-­friendly University” several times in succession, because the monitoring of its work regarding equality and family friendliness as well as maintaining its standards in this area is always an important ongoing issue for the university.

Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf is one of the few universities in North Rhine-Westphalia which are planning to embed firmly the gender topic in the curriculum. Hence, the project “Men, Women, and Medicine” (“Männer, Frauen und Medizin”) is currently founded by the Centre for Competence Development for Diversity Management in Teaching and Learning at Universities in NRW (North Rhine-Westphalia) (Zentrum für Kompetenzentwicklung für Diversity Management  in Studium und Lehre an Hochschulen in NRW, KomDiM).

For a forward‐thinking society and a modern university, variety with regard to perspectives and experience is a tremendous enrichment. That is why Heinrich Heine University sees diversity as both a gain and an opportunity. Accordingly, it has set itself the goal of resolutely fostering variety and rejecting discrimination of any kind. With numerous types of support measures and advice services, Heinrich Heine University makes sure that the individual potential of each of its members – whether students or staff – is given ample encouragement.