War conflicts (colonial, interstate, civil and internationalised civil ones), a total of 54 in 35 countries as of 2021(Palik et al., 2022), produce refugees and other displaced people (Howard, 2018). About 89.3 million forcibly displaced individuals worldwide, of whom women accounted for approximately 49% (UNHCR, 2022). During Europe's 2015‑17 refugee crisis, women lodged only about 30% of all asylum applications and received 35% of all positive first-instance decisions in the EU‑28 (OECD, 2023). That statistic is similar for higher education: in Germany, the ratio was 78 % male refugee students to 22 % female ones, and the same trends were apparent in the proportions in other countries (EU Commission, 2019). The war in Ukraine increased the share of refugees in the EU to more than 20% (EC, 2024). Germany, Italy, and Spain are among the countries with the highest total numbers of Ukrainian refugees (OECD, 2023). The peculiarity of this refugee flow is that the share of women among adult refugees is around 70% in most host countries, creating unique challenges for integration. Refugee women may suffer from a “triple disadvantage” as the challenges related to gender, immigrant status, and forced migration add up and mutually reinforce each other (Liebig & Tronstad, 2018). Being in a more favourable situation as compared with other refugees due to the possibility of employment in the University and continuing their professional career, female refugee scientists face barriers (Crea, 2016) like language and cultural adjustment, recognition of qualification, work-life balance, legal and administrative hurdles, social support, mental health struggle. Considering the number of female refugee researchers from war zones hosted by European universities (i.a., within the Science4Refugees Initiative of the European Research Council (ERA,2022), mentoring might become an effective instrument of their integration into the European academic and scientific community, making all the stakeholders (Brizuela et al. (2023)) benefit from this development tool (Jones, 2017). Therefore, mentoring for female refugee academic staff is in high demand, though more research is needed. The research question of this presentation is: “What are the peculiarities of mentoring female refugee academic staff in European universities compared with other ones (early and mid-career, science2business, etc.)?”. Through this research, we aim to unveil both prosperous and challenging practices of academic mentoring of female researchers hosted by German, Italian and Spanish universities because of global conflicts.

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