Women in Leadership training in Basel · canton of Bâle-VilleWomen’s leadership in the canton of Basel-Stadt: how can individual contributions be made visible in collective success?
In the canton of Basel-Stadt, a centre of pharmaceuticals and life sciences, highly qualified international research teams operate in a border region adjoining Germany and France. For SHR’s “Women’s Leadership” programme, this raises a practical question: how can contributions to a collective project be documented without turning cooperation into a competition for visibility?
What the literature establishes
Madeline E. Heilman and Michelle C. Haynes (2005, Journal of Applied Psychology) experimentally investigated credit allocation in mixed-gender teams succeeding at a male-typed task. When individual contributions were ambiguous, women received less credit than their male partners. Their experiments indicate that individualised performance information can reduce this devaluation.
A complementary mechanism: the availability of memories
Michael Ross and Fiore Sicoly (1979, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology) show that people engaged in a shared activity can overestimate their own share of responsibility. Their research links this bias in part to the greater availability of their own contributions in memory. Without establishing a mechanism specific to women, these findings help explain why a collective review based solely on spontaneous recollections is not a neutral record of the work performed.
The hasty conclusion: asking women to promote themselves more
One might conclude that participants simply need to learn to claim their achievements more assertively. That interpretation, however, leaves intact a system requiring everyone to defend their contribution retrospectively. An alternative is to make work traceable across the whole team, distinguishing responsibility for a deliverable, technical input and coordination activities. (our executive and employee training programmes)
The limits of the evidence and of conventional reviews
These studies measure neither practices in Basel-based companies nor the effects of SHR training. Experimental settings do not reproduce the full interdependence of international R&D, and a contribution register can itself favour what is easy to count. The number of documents produced is therefore insufficient to assess scientific input, problem-solving or liaison work between sites.
A practical check in Basel
In a hypothetical case suitable for the SHR programme, a manager in Basel coordinates a pharmaceutical project involving international R&D and Rhine logistics, with counterparts in Germany and France. Before the next milestone review, the team records the technical and coordination contributions to each deliverable, their author or co-authors and a verifiable record, then validates the register collectively. The proposed measure is the proportion of deliverables whose contributions are documented and confirmed in this way, with disputed attributions reported separately. This check assesses documentation quality, not the absence of bias or equality of career prospects. To go further: explore the Women in Leadership training in Basel in the canton of Basel-Stadt, or browse our executive and employee training programmes in Switzerland.
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