Background

Globalization, demographic change, migration, and increasing diversity are changing our society and changing us as a foundation. Stiftung Mercator has set a goal of making comprehensive education, equal opportunities, and improving the social prerequisites for the peaceful coexistence of people of different backgrounds, convictions, and socioeconomic status. We want to bring people of different cultural, social, and professional backgrounds and perspectives together in our team. Our understanding of diversity goes beyond distinguishing between individual categories such as the “experience of migration”. We embrace the diversity of our society as a whole and are keen to reflect this within our foundation. We value the wealth of experience that our employees have and invite them to draw on this in their work for the foundation. We want those who have experienced discrimination to feel valued in our team. A diverse team provides us with different perspectives on our topics, increasing the quality and credibility of our work. We have great respect and appreciation for the variety of experiences, views, and lifestyle choices of our staff.

 

Language

We are very conscious of the way we use language. As a matter of principle, we want our words, texts, and images to fully represent women, men, and non-binary people as independent individuals with equal rights and equal value. We use the * in the German language to highlight that. Language also highlights differences in terms of cultural background and life situations. We take care to ensure that the language and visual imagery we use reflect the heterogeneity of our ethnically and culturally diverse society. We apply these principles to all key texts and documents in external communication, project management, administration, calls for applications, letter templates, and the entire recruitment process.

Employees

We want to increase the diversity of our team and the proportion of ethnic minorities and people of color. When recruiting new staff, we always ensure that every stage of the application process adheres to the legally required equal opportunity principles in Germany and embraces to the greatest possible extent diverse cultural, professional, and social backgrounds and that this is also reflected in our team. We carefully examine any existing prejudicial structures and bias and use continuing training sessions, guidelines, and diversity training courses to ensure that they have no impact on decision-making. This strategy is the joint responsibility of everyone involved in the recruitment process and all our employees.

We undertake this position to ensure that candidates invited to interview include at least one person of whichever gender is underrepresented in the department or area in question. Furthermore, we make sure that interviewees also include individuals from different cultural, professional, or social backgrounds. To achieve this, we employ conventional recruitment methods and target candidates in specific networks (e.g., ArbeiterKind.de; START scholarship-holders, SWANS initiative). To ensure that we treat our existing workforce in a diversity-sensitive and diversity-friendly way, we analyze our salary scales at regular intervals with respect to gender equality.

 

Funding recipients/events/projects

Stiftung Mercator takes care to embrace diversity in terms of gender and cultural, professional and social background when filling its vacancies, when engaging speakers for events, when appointing committees in project and partner contexts, and selecting individuals who will be particularly promoted/visible. We are in conversation about the subject of diversity with our network of partners.

A variety of rules ensures that we uphold this commitment:

  • When selecting three people or more for a panel or speaking slots, at least one of them must be female. Our goal is to achieve a 50:50 mix in the number of speakers overall. In addition, we also make sure that appropriate numbers of ethnic minorities and people of color are selected according to the proportion they make up of Germany’s overall population.
  • When it comes to events at which usually only one person will be speaking (Mercator Lecture, Brown Bag Lunches etc.) and high-level positions for which we are able to pick the incumbent (fellows and possibly advisory boards in projects, etc.), our rule is that an overall balance should be guaranteed.
  • If a male employee is invited to represent Stiftung Mercator on an advisory board, jury, or similar body that to date has been composed solely or predominantly of men, he will propose a female colleague instead.
  • If a male representative of Stiftung Mercator is asked to give a welcome speech at an event at which all the welcome speeches are to be given by men, he will arrange to have a female colleague give the speech in his place.
  • Furthermore, steps will be taken to ensure that Stiftung Mercator involves ethnic minorities and people of color in committees whose composition we are able to influence and in our external representation.