Advancing equality in Academia for all

Camille Baudoncq is a former criminal lawyer and a survivor of sexual abuse by a university professor whose actions went unaddressed by the institution for years. Despite multiple internal complaints, the university failed to act, treating the case as if the accused were innocent until proven guilty. The academic environment, which should have been a place of learning and safety, became a setting where power was abused, complaints were ignored, and victims were left unsupported. Determined to prevent others from experiencing the same injustice, she co-founded the Alliance for Equality in Academia.

Jean-Pierre van Boxel is a Senior Specialized Police Inspector and Judicial Police Officer. He has spent most of his career in police departments specializing in the management of cases involving sexual offenses and assaults, and in interviewing victims and perpetrators of sexual offenses. In parallel with his work in the field, he has been a lecturer in Techniques for Interviewing Minors (Technique d’Auditions de Mineurs d’âge, T.A.M.) at the Federal Police Research School and has specialized in recent years in the field of incest, crimes against children, the family, and society (a course taught at the Brussels Regional Police Academy). It was his experience in the field of power dynamics that led him to become a co-founder of the Alliance for Equality in Academia.

Urša Opara Krašovec is Slovene and holds a PhD in chemistry. She has been a Principal Investigator in several international research projects related to advanced materials mainly for solar energy applications and has supervised several PhD students. She publicly raised concerns about systemic abuse of power in the awarding criteria and habilitation, authorship, and the problematic nature of precarious employment in academia. Her journey in reporting irregularities is best described in Chapter 10 On Being a Whistleblower: From One Who Has Walked the Path in the ENRIO Handbook on Whistleblower Protection in Research. She is an advocate for women’s and worker’s rights in Academia. She is also a member of European Network of Research Integrity Offices (ENRIO) and has coordinated the ENRIO2025 Congress that emphasized institutional responsibility to foster an open, safe and inclusive research environment as a foundation for Research Integrity in everyday practice.

She co-founded the Alliance for Equality in Academia.

Caroline Nieberding is a Belgian professor of Ecology since 2008. She is a survivor of repeated sexual and psychological harassment, as well as abuse of power throughout her training and academic career. During this time, she witnessed similar behaviors directed at her female colleagues and members of her staff across multiple European campuses. Violence continues to drive many women out of academia, which represents a major societal challenge, as it severely limits women’s access to leadership positions across European fields of expertise. Over the past two decades, the situation has shown little improvement, and highly talented women who lack the protection of powerful allies (such as a father, partner, or mentor) remain particularly vulnerable. Prof. Nieberding is committed to professionalizing and significantly improving the institutional and legal handling of victims’ complaints at the European level. Her goal is to end the impunity of perpetrators and to secure meaningful reparation for the damage inflicted on victims’ academic careers.

She co-founded the Alliance for Equality in Academia and is its current co-Administrator.

Bertanne Visser is a Dutch scientist and Principal Investigator. She holds a PhD in evolutionary ecology and currently works at the University of Liège in Belgium. She has seen and increasingly experienced harassment and discrimination pursuing a career at the highest level in academia. She faced serious retaliation after speaking up about her experiences with major consequences for her professional and personal life. You can read more about her experiences on the #MeToo University webpage of her laboratory, in the Flemish newspaper De Morgen, and the Walloon investigative journalism magazine Médor. Seeing the systemic, institutional means by which academic organizations marginalize, sideline, and push out women, witnesses, and whistleblowers, she believes we now need to stand up as a collective to obtain a safe work environment and equality for all in academia.

She co-founded the Alliance for Equality in Academia and is its current co-Administrator.

Jean-Pascal van Ypersele is a Belgian climate physicist and professor who has worked on human-induced climate change for more than 45 years. He has been active in the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, since 1995, and was one of its three Vice-chairs from 2008 to 2015. He never hesitated to speak truth to power about climate and the environment. He has always been sensitive to discrimination and gender issues. When he learned about the discrimination and harassment, both moral and sexual, experienced by his colleagues Profs. Caroline Nieberding and Bertanne Visser, he denounced them to the Université catholique de Louvain (UCLouvain) authorities, privately at first, then publicly, as their situation was worsening. He was recognised as a whistleblower, and following his alerts the judicial system opened an enquiry into the way UCLouvain was handling harassment and sexual abuse cases. As a result, UCLouvain was forced to pay 30000 euros to the treasury, and to enter into a mediation with the victims. Convinced that the academic environment is fertile ground for abuse, and that cliques and conflicts of interest often lead to very poor prevention and management of harassment and abuse issues in universities and higher education, he co-founded the Alliance for Equality in Academia.

Danièle Zucker holds a PhD in psychology and led the psychiatric emergency department at CHU Saint-Pierre (Belgium) for fifteen years. She also received training in FBI investigative methods from the pioneers of profiling. Today, she works as an investigator on cases of murder, sexual assault, and workplace harassment. Having witnessed firsthand inappropriate statements made by academic authorities regarding transgressive behaviors on university campuses, she is committed to ensuring that victims can be heard in a professional context, that perpetrators are sanctioned proportionally to their actions, and that investigations can be outsourced and conducted by trained, independent, and impartial experts.

She co-founded the Alliance for Equality in Academia.

She co-founded H.E.R. (Harassment – Enquiry – Recommendations).

She is the author of “Profiling, comment le criminel se trahit” edition Racine, “Le viol au-delà des idées reçues” edition Plon.