BIH Gender Equality Fund 2026
Promoting equal opportunity and achieving equal participation for everyone are among BIH’s strategic goals and provide an important basis for excellent research. Despite the high percentage of female students, women remain underrepresented in certain academic fields (notably medicine), in scientific research, and in professorships. Structural barriers often hinder and impede their career path, especially when they take on family care responsibilities. BIH seeks to remedy this situation by supporting the career paths of women scientists and clinicians. Each year, a call for applications is issued for the BIH Gender Equality Fund in order to promote the research activities of women scientists and clinicians.
Eligibility
Eligible to apply are early- and mid-career women scientists, such as:
PhD Students
Postdocs
Juniorprofessors (W1)
Group leaders
(Junior) Clinician Scientists and (Junior) Digital Clinician Scientists
The prerequisite is that you are assigned to the BIH Unit (exception: Clinician Scientists).
With the BIH Gender Equality Fund, the BIH specifically supports women scientists with family responsibilities in order to compensate for existing disadvantages such as work prohibitions in the laboratory, multiple burdens due to family, scientific qualification and clinical work. The following conditions therefore apply to the application.
Requirements for the application:
- Implementation of a translational research project
- Family responsibilities (especially currently pregnant or on maternity or parental leave, children <12 years, single parent, care responsibilities)
- temporary position or a scholarship
Scope of funding
Financial means up to a maximum of 10.000€ per applicant will be provided to support the scientific work of the applicant. These funds can be used to finance one or more student assistants as well as any consumables urgently needed for research. The student assistant will be employed at BIH/Charité and should work at least 40 h/month if possible. The funds are only available in 2027. Please quantify the required funds already in the application and explain what you specifically need the funds for.
Please use the Charité’s cost calculator to work out staff costs. https://intranet.charite.de/personal_organisationsentwicklung/personalgewinnung/kostenkalkulation/ →Tarifvertrag für studentische Beschäftigte 2026-2028 →Haushaltsbrutto
Please contact your group leader to discuss your application to ensure that the necessary work equipment and space for the assistant are available
Application procedure
Please use the corresponding PDF form for the application.
Deadline is 21.09.2026
You can submit the application in German or English.
The award decision will be made on the basis of the available resources. If there are more applications than funds available, a BIH internal selection will be made according to urgency and social criteria as well as affiliation with the BIH unit.
Contact details
If you have any questions, please contact Karin Höhne.
