🧩 The Challenge
To get more women to work in transportation, Serbia is going right to the top. The teachers in higher education and technical schools who prepare students for careers in transport tend to be men. Most of the students are men. It is no wonder that, in many countries, transport tends to be thought of as a place for men to work. A scarcity of female teachers, professors, and even students make it hard for female engineers to find mentors.
Working with Serbia’s Ministry of Construction, Transportation, and Infrastructure, the World Bank is supporting a pilot—the Serbia Railway Sector Modernization project (P170868)—to give three PhD scholarships to women working in the railway business. A key condition of the program, as in other scholarship programs, is a mandatory requirement to work in Serbia for at least four years after completing the program.
🛠️ The Intervention
The PhD scholarship program got off to a rough start. Recruiting candidates was slow. Only four women applied and only two of those met the minimum criteria. The PhD candidates were required to finish their degree programs in three years or repay their tuition. Many women, who often juggle multiple responsibilities, found this deadline tight.
Despite delays and a very small candidate pool, the PhD generated interest from students and school administrators. This indicates that the PhD program has the potential to inspire women to do high-level study in engineering and logistics, disciplines that are important for railways.
đź’ˇ Lessons Learned
Several lessons emerge from the PhD program’s challenges and successes:
- Piloting and Experimentation: New ideas often encounter hurdles. The PhD program, an innovative idea, highlights the critical need for flexibility in response to feedback and unforeseen obstacles.
- Clear and Realistic Timelines: The delay in starting the program, compounded by its tight deadline could have scared off some potential candidates. In the future, the PhD program’s timeframe needs to align with realistic academic timelines or offer extensions.
- Stakeholder Engagement and Communication: A key lesson here is the imperative to balance stakeholder input while avoiding disruptive power struggles. Some university faculty disagreed about which department would take the lead on selection, which created delays. Finally, the candidate selection committee was taken entirely off campus.
- Communication Challenges: Despite efforts to share information about the scholarships, the small number of applicants suggests that either the outreach was inadequate or there is not much demand for transport PhDs.
- Private Sector Engagement: This program could benefit from collaboration with the private sector both to fund the scholarships and to make sure the PhD scholars’ studies are relevant in the workplace.
- A Pathway to a PhD: An internship program open to men and women in vocational schools and universities will provide a hands-on introduction to working for the railway sector while also advancing the female PhD program, deepening the pool of female talent in both academia and the workforce.
Note: Svetlana Vukanovic (Senior Transport Specialist, World Bank), Larisa Puzovic (Lead of the Project Implementation Unit of the Railway Project), and Sonja Mamic (Advisor to Assistant Minister for Railway) provided inputs into this case study.