Project description
Empowering girls in political self-efficacy
Gender, social and racial inequalities are among the most crucial reasons why democracy must be better nurtured today. While data show secondary school girls often lack political self-awareness compared to boys of the same age, social class and ethnicity are also significant determinants of inequalities in political self-efficacy. The EU-funded G-EPIC project aims to change this by bringing state-of-play didactics into school classrooms to observe and analyse how such gender gaps form. Bringing together seven partners from six countries, the project will carry out experimental research to allow the creation and dissemination of gender empowerment in classroom interventions developed in collaboration with civil society, educators and students.
Objective
Ensuring the future of democracy requires empowering all social group to engage, yet the gender gap in political leadership, political ambition and political self-efficacy is the most persistent and most difficult to tackle across Western democracies. The situation when looking across the intersect of gender, social class and ethnicity becomes even more grave. These differences have been shown to begin in the school and classroom dynamics has been cited as the likely socialisation process that leads to these different outcomes.
G-EPIC, a multinational consortium of universities and civil society organisations, has been brought together with the aim of fostering social innovation and testing interventions to reduce gender inequality in politics. The 7 partners in 6 countries (Belgium, Czechia, Denmark, Germany, Spain and United Kingdom) will begin by establishing the state of play through classroom observations and reanalysis of existing quantitative data to understand how inequalities in attitudes and dispositions towards political engagement are learnt. G-EPIC will then create experiments in schools and pilot design-based interventions co-developed with civil-society, teachers and students. These experiments and interventions will be rigorously evaluated in comparisons with control groups and will lead to the development of the Gender Empowerment in Classroom intervention that will be disseminated and delivered in schools across Europe creating the possibility for real change and the reduction of the gender gap in political leadership. In addition, G-EPIC will also carry out a holistic evaluation of the national context and the local and European policy framework to design strategies, regulations and policies that are conducive to a more equitable gender political involvement, particularly of girls with a disadvantaged background.
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HORIZON-RIA - HORIZON Research and Innovation ActionsCoordinator
1050 Bruxelles / Brussel
Belgium