The scholarships promoting women in the academics have been redesigned and now focus on scientific disciplines in which women are strongly underrepresented. These scholarships are distributed across the individual institutes.
An indicator is being used, to filter out the scientific disciplines with the lowest percentage of female students, as well as the lowest drop-out rate among these few female students. The selected disciplines then receive funding for dissertation scholarships, which they can award to female doctoral students.
This change is due to legal reasons: Measures that favor one gender (such as scholarships exclusively for women) may only be taken if there is a clear shortage of representatives of that gender. Across all subjects, this no longer applies to doctoral degree programs at the University of Graz. Therefore, the previous measures cannot be continued.