Soon Bachvarova realized that the place to be to do what she wanted to do was the UT, specifically in the Human Media Interaction Group, headed by Professor Anton Nijholt.
There, under the daily supervision of Betsy van Dijk, Bachvarova works on automatic generation of multimedia presentation, in particular how to decide optimal final presentation. Applications may include solving crisis situations where information is gathered from various electronic sources, delivered and later processed to assess the most efficient ways to deal with the crisis. Bachvarova's part is determining the modalities for data distribution.
Because we met Bachvarova through the Female Faculty Network at Twente, we were curious about any gender-related issues she might encounter professionally. `There are no gender-related troubles at work. For me personally, this problem does not exist.' (She concedes, `At the PhD-stage, there is little gender discrimination.') `But friends started talking about problems.' So she attended FFNT's Professional Women conference in November and was shocked by the statistics regarding how few women are involved in science. She acknowledges that a deficit of women in science is a problem Europe-wide, but it is much worse in the Netherlands.
This got her thinking about how to analyze the problem. She couldn't help comparing social frameworks between Bulgaria and the Netherlands. While Bachvarova professes to only a layman's observation, she is earnest in her conviction that the gender issue is complex matter to be considered by qualified researchers: `The social aspect of the problem is one of the most important to consider. In doing so, different social frameworks can be analyzed and compared. Available methodologies can be applied to investigate which were the factors and precisely how they played a role in shaping the problem in question. It would be interesting to know whether two such different social paradigms as the Dutch and the ex-communist Bulgarian ones ended up with similar situations of women in science. If `yes,' why? Is this a social problem? If yes, to what extent and how? Answering these questions can give invaluable insight as to how to address the problem now.'
From what she has observed in the Netherlands, generally speaking, there is an equality between the sexes at home which does not extend to the workplace. In the past, there was not the same economic need to work outside the home, and it was highly esteemed to stay at home with children. These ideas still influence Dutch society today.
In Bulgaria, after WWII, there was a `new social order, a kind of experiment.' Communist regimes imposed strict gender equality with no exception. All women worked. Bacharova recalls propaganda declaring that no job was suitable exclusively for a man or for a woman - from truck drivers to daycare workers. Gender distinction was seen as `morally bad.'
Bachvarova encountered `housewives' for the first time when she moved to the Netherlands; they do not exist in Bulgaria. When she was growing up, all mothers worked. Daycare was provided by the government for everybody. As a child, she found it tiring to be in daycare for the entire workday. When she started first grade at age 7, she had to go home at noon to an empty house and stay alone until her parents returned home that evening. Few couples had more than three children, in part because it was virtually impossible for both parents to work full-time and to care for their children properly.
Although equality was a highly esteemed value, Bulgaria remained a patriarchal society. The greatest burden fell on women. At work, they were equal. At home, significant gender differences remained: household chores and child-rearing were primarily the wife's domain.
Bachvarova's parents were mathematicians at Sofia University. `The discrepancy between imposed gender equality was ultimately negative for my mother. My mother sacrificed her career to take care of her family, her home.'
If there was such strictly imposed gender equality, then why were the top positions occupied only by men? There were lots of female doctors, but the surgeons were mainly male. Many women worked at universities, but predominantly men were the full professors. It was fine for women to be colleagues and peers, but somehow it felt `strange' for a woman to be boss.
Bachvarova seems to regard the experiment as a failure on many levels, yet wistfully she muses, `If our generation had continued, there would have been changes; old patterns were fading.' More pragmatically, Bachvarova adds, `The fact that all men and women were equally stimulated to get equally strong education in all disciplines was undoubtedly a gain for the society.'
