So what am I going to do with you today? I already started with my little introduction,

trying to show what my motivation is for this kind of research and talk. I would then go

a little bit into the idea of excellence. What does excellence really mean? We all talk

about excellence in universities and recently also in German universities, but what does

it really mean? I will then talk about visibility because excellence without visibility is not

there and there might also be visibility without excellence in research, which could be a problem.

I would then like to take you with me into some results of own empirical research projects

about the obvious or perceived difficulties or contradictions between equality and excellence

and also about excellence and visibility of excellence. My conclusion will be that we

have to rethink our concept of excellence and we also have to improve visibility, in

particular visibility of younger researchers. So as I said, one of my motivation or my team's

motivation to look into these issues is the situation of women in science and we can still

see, and mathematics is a very good example for this, that women in science are still

underrepresented very often in many subjects and their achievements are not taken into

account or not seen very often. This slide shows some very good and prominent women in

science, but if we see it in general, we can see that the scientific system, at least in

Germany, has developed over centuries under the exclusion of women and in Germany, for

example, women were only admitted at universities a little bit more than 100 years ago and for

a long time their contributions to science, to research were not recognized or they were

even questioned. There are of course exceptions like Marie Curie, but in general this is the

finding and still if we look today at what we regard the ideal scientific personality, it's still

predominantly male scientists we have in mind. You can also see this if you look at shares of

men and women at different stages of the academic career and what I brought with me today is the

chart from my Bundesland, Northern Westphalia, which shows clearly that at the level of students

to the left, Studierende, women and men are balanced 50-50 percent. Even if you look at

the students doing their degrees, we now have more women than men, almost 54 percent women,

but if you look at PhD students, if you look in particular at those doing their habilitation

and professors to the right, there's still a very big gap between men and women and at the level of

professors we now have about one third female and two third male professors.

We have to be careful with this graph because it's not a longitudinal

graph, it shows the situation in 2021, which means that of course today's students could develop

in another way, but there are still enough signs that show that the idea of the perception of who

is excellent and who can make an academic career differs a lot when it comes to men and women.

So the question is who becomes visible with her and or his research.

If we look at what is excellence, and this is my second point, I would like to spend some time

on this idea of excellence. What does it mean? It comes from Latin, excelore, to excel, to stand

out or excelencia, and if you look in German history, the academic history, it's a quite

recent phenomenon in the discourse on science and higher education, but it's also a very

important part of the German education policy. When I started, I did my PhD in 1995 and then there

was no idea of excellence, better excellence universities or other universities, they didn't

exist. So it started in the 2000s with this when new public management became a dominant idea

in German universities, and this meant that we had a changeover to stronger detailed control of

the university, to monitoring the results. We had a trend towards matricification of input and output

dimensions, and this contributed to this idea of what is excellent, we have to measure excellence,

and we have to develop criteria. When we talk about excellence, we have to differentiate between

different levels of excellence. Institutions can be excellent, this is not the political level,

it can also be personal excellence or the excellence of processes or results, these are different

things. In 2004 in Germany, we started with what we call the German excellence initiatives,

some of you are probably quite familiar with this idea, I was not. What was the aim of this

excellence initiative? It was to strengthen top level research in Germany and improve its