Academic promotion criteria

If the work that fills the centres and the cohorts does not count toward promotion, the same researchers who build women’s health research as a field will need to leave it to advance their careers. The centres become flagship destinations, and the talent flows out the back door. University-level recognition, formal acknowledgement in tenure rules and promotion panels, is what makes women’s health scholarship a viable career path.

The lighter-touch path is for universities to embed recognition of sex and gender methodology into existing CoARA- and NOR-CAM-aligned assessment frameworks, using the broader move toward responsible research assessment as the carrier rather than creating new criteria. The value is that career incentives align with field-building investment without adding bureaucracy. The Nordic Association of University Administrators, Karolinska Institutet (a DORA signatory since 2020), and the Helsinki and Norwegian university coalitions, already leading on assessment reform, are positioned to model what this looks like in practice.