Although Koç University has a high ratio of female employees, the distribution of gender among academic departments and administrative units is uneven, with some departments having a significantly low number of women. Additionally, women leave the institution in larger numbers, especially in their first few years, and there is a need for institutional structures and support programs dedicated to the development of certain professional skills of female employees to prepare them for leadership roles. Institutional procedures and practices need to be reviewed to standardize recruitment and career support structures for early career researchers, and job advertisements require a critical gender-sensitive lens.
To improve gender equality in recruitment and career progression, Koç University has developed several objectives and actions. These include achieving gender balance in recruitment and promotion committees, providing implicit bias training to all recruitment committee members and recruiters, standardizing job advertisements, developing specialized and proactive outreach activities to attract women candidates, establishing institutional monitoring and evaluation mechanisms of female turnover, and building a sustainable and reportable exit survey and interview structure for academic and administrative employees and R1 researchers exit.