Diversity and Inclusion

At DTU Compute, we have a large focus on creating a good working environment. Our work with diversity and inclusion is an essential part of that. We believe that having a good working environment is a necessary foundation to provide excellent research, teaching, supervision, innovation, and administration.

Psychologically safe workplace

Our aim is to make sure everyone feels welcome and is able to grow their skills, competencies, and creativity, and excel their strengths.

We do this by working to increase the level of psychological safety in the department.

Psychological safety is the belief that you will not be humiliated or punished if you speak out loud about mistakes, doubts, questions, disagreements or ideas, and where people feel safe to express themselves and be themselves.

To support psychological safety, employees and managers at DTU Compute have decided to follow three guiding principles:

Respect

• Respect means to accept and show regard for other people’s qualities, knowledge, abilities, contributions, perspectives, and viewpoints, regardless of their role or seniority.
• We show respect by treating our colleagues as equals regardless of their background (academic, nationality, gender, seniority, age or otherwise).

Openness

• Openness means to support collaboration between individuals and sections whenever possible and to share ideas and projects.
• We encourage all to share mistakes and celebrate failures as important learning points. We actively invite opposing views, especially in research matters, as this can strengthen our research excellence.

Transparency

• Transparency means open communication between leadership and employees.
• Management and supervisors commit to openly, honestly and consistently sharing expectations, mistakes, setbacks, and feedback. In return, junior faculty and employees commit to asking questions and sharing feedback, challenges, and ideas.

Diversity group and Head of Diversity

Diversity and inclusion do not happen on its own. That is why we have created a structure that drives our diversity agenda, our initiatives and projects.

We have appointed a Head of Diversity responsible for driving our Diversity Living Lab projects and all initiatives within diversity and inclusion. The lab explores and tests initiatives to improve inclusion, with a particular focus on supporting women and international researchers in STEM environments. 

We also have a Diversity group with representatives from all sections at DTU Compute. The Diversity group’s main role is to act as advisory board for the management group and to discuss and present recommendations in diversity and inclusion matters.

Examples of initiatives from the Diversity group:

• Diversity workshops for all employees and managers
• Participation in mentor program with Microsoft for female master’s students
• Development of our Living Lab Project
• Making sure bathrooms are available for all genders
• Recommendations for the guiding principles and their implementation
• DEI - Diversity, Equity, Inclusion - talks and seminars
• Reviewing recruitment and promotion processes to reduce possible bias
• Contact persons initiative

Contact persons

As part of our focus and work with well-being and making DTU Compute a good place to work for all, we work to make it easy for everyone to find help if they need it. We have a number of contact persons that employees can talk to.

The contact persons act as a Friendly Ear with whom you can share your experiences in confidence and anonymity and who will listen with an open mind. The contact persons can be either health and safety representatives, union representatives, or appointed faculty depending on who you feel most comfortable talking to.

We also offer coaching for our PhD students and psychological counselling service for all employees and PhD students.

The appointed contact persons have a special focus on issues related to discrimination, sexism, loneliness, and lack of belonginess. 

For DTU Compute staffs: Learn more on DTU Inside