Periodic Reporting for period 1 - INSPIRE (European Centre of Excellence on Inclusive Gender Equality in Research & Innovation: Creating Knowledge & Engaging in Collaborative Action)
Reporting period: 2022-10-01 to 2023-09-30
INSPIRE aims to be Europe's sustainable Centre of Excellence, globally renowned for the quality of its research and analysis produced on inclusive gender equality in research and innovation. It brings together cutting-edge knowledge, ambitious policy approaches, and innovative practices to provide a gateway for scholars, equality experts, practitioners and trainers to connect and share resources, co-create new ones, and link strategically with public and private institutions to benefit the European Research Area. INSPIRE's ambitious research programme develops new, relevant indicators for inclusive GEP development, conducts a GEP monitoring survey throughout Europe whilst identifies key configurations of GEP success and failure. INSPIRE counts on 4 Knowledge & Support Hubs (KSHs) led by leading academics and renowned practitioners throughout Europe to develop cutting edge knowledge on sustaining change, widening participation, intersectionality and fostering innovation and change in the private sector.
This initial stage has been of particular importance in building the up the foundations of the project principally through Strategic Analysis (WP2). This includes scoping the literature in our main thematic areas, carrying out a national expert questionnaire, mapping both current and potential experts and stakeholders, establishing a robust system for ensuring the quality of knowledge production and support mechanisms, defining key concepts essential to the project's scope, constructing strategic research guidance that incorporates feminist principles, pedagogy, open science/innovation, and decolonial approaches as well as developing a Policy Brief on Inclusive GEPs from an intersectional perspective. We have also made significant progress in establishing the methodological foundations for two key components of the project. This phase has also entailed recruiting experts to each of the KSHs as well as developing strategies for approaching and selecting Communities of Practice.
Building on the scoping literature reviews that we carried out we can identify the main results to date:
Sustaining Change:
Despite the policy approach of structural change for gender equality in R&I organisations, progress in achieving gender balance and equity mirrors organisations in other sectors, and can be described as slow at best. Schneider and Somers, (2006) identify how change in organisations and institutions must be seen as dynamic and multi-directional, so organisational change requires the rewiring of institutional practices (Nicolini, 2019) both from the bottom up and from top down.
Geographically context-sensitive equality policies:
Geographic inclusiveness as conceived by INSPIRE consists of a comprehensive approach to build inclusive gender equality policies considering specificities of social and political contexts and building on past experiences and practices, including those situated outside Western and Eurocentric genealogies of knowledge.
Intersectionality:
Intersectional policies in R&I organisations aim to address inequalities and discrimination that occur on multiple, intersecting axes including but not limited to gender, race, ethnicity, ability, age and sexual orientation and that operate on different levels. The focus is on exposing the interlocking systems of oppression and privilege that exist not only on the individual and interpersonal level but also on the level of systemic processes and social structures a focus on how classism, ableism, racism (not race), etc., are interlocked and how these and other systems of sameness and difference relate to power, and mutually reinforce each other.
Inclusive gendered innovations:
Gendered Innovations are those innovations in which the gender dimension is integrated into all aspects of the R&D process. Despite the great strides that gendered innovations have made in terms of integrating the sex- and gender-based analysis in research content, academic innovation research still leans very heavily on male perspectives (Henry et al 2016) whilst it tends to address men’s rather than women’s needs.
Sustaining Change:
Despite the policy approach of structural change for gender equality in R&I organisations, progress in achieving gender balance and equity mirrors organisations in other sectors, and can be described as slow at best. Schneider and Somers, (2006) identify how change in organisations and institutions must be seen as dynamic and multi-directional, so organisational change requires the rewiring of institutional practices (Nicolini, 2019) both from the bottom up and from top down.
Geographically context-sensitive equality policies:
Geographic inclusiveness as conceived by INSPIRE consists of a comprehensive approach to build inclusive gender equality policies considering specificities of social and political contexts and building on past experiences and practices, including those situated outside Western and Eurocentric genealogies of knowledge.
Intersectionality:
Intersectional policies in R&I organisations aim to address inequalities and discrimination that occur on multiple, intersecting axes including but not limited to gender, race, ethnicity, ability, age and sexual orientation and that operate on different levels. The focus is on exposing the interlocking systems of oppression and privilege that exist not only on the individual and interpersonal level but also on the level of systemic processes and social structures a focus on how classism, ableism, racism (not race), etc., are interlocked and how these and other systems of sameness and difference relate to power, and mutually reinforce each other.
Inclusive gendered innovations:
Gendered Innovations are those innovations in which the gender dimension is integrated into all aspects of the R&D process. Despite the great strides that gendered innovations have made in terms of integrating the sex- and gender-based analysis in research content, academic innovation research still leans very heavily on male perspectives (Henry et al 2016) whilst it tends to address men’s rather than women’s needs.