Final Report Summary - GENPORT (An internet portal for sharing knowledge and inspiring collaborative action on gender and science)
Executive Summary:
GenPORT is an Internet portal where communities of experts, practitioners, policy-makers and researchers can share knowledge and engage in collaborative actions to advance understanding of how gender and science influence one another and impact on society. The portal was constructed over a period of 4 years (2013-2017) through a process of extensive consultation with many target user groups in Europe and beyond. The GenPORT community is made up of organizations and individuals working across the globe for gender equality and excellence in science, technology and innovation. This covers all sciences – natural and social sciences, and humanities.
GenPORT provides a platform for organizations and individuals to showcase their work, and to act as a gateway to a wealth of research resources, policy information, practical materials, and much more. Constantly evolving as a destination to wide range of online information sources and services, GenPORT future will be shaped by the activities and contributions of its community members. The core aim is to facilitate the exchange of experiences, knowledge, research materials and tools, and to foster collaboration by advancing research, informing policy, and disseminating practical interventions in pursuit of lasting gender equality improvements in science and society.
GenPORT offers to its users a variety of benefits not available elsewhere in one location. As a user you can find on GenPORT:
* Opportunities to join in a community-wide effort to develop, share, and apply quality research and practices addressing gender issues in science (broadly defined)
* Gender experts who understand your field and can advise on the relevance of the gender dimension in your research, or when planning a Horizon 2020 proposal
* A wealth of gender in science resources to explore ideas, important findings, and best practices relevant to different research topics, or in relation to specific Horizon 2020 calls
* Evidence of differences in need or preferences among potential target users of your research to design effective, gender sensitive and impact-creating dissemination and outreach strategies.
* An infrastructure and services for freely sharing knowledge and experiences through e-discussions, blog-posts, and a consolidated gender and science taxonomy.
At the end of the project , the Portal offers +500 users, +1130 resources, +180 events, +270 organizations, +110 Blog Posts. In addition, the project Consortium has produced a series of fresh resources and services, including:
* 26 Policy Briefs reports
* 6 Research Synthesis reports
* +26 videos with expert interviews (published on the GenPORT Blog).
* Gender & Science Taxonomy (to structure resources and policy measures related to gender and science and enable effective sharing with other online services)
* Directory of experts who combine knowledge of gender and science issues
Project Context and Objectives:
GenPORT contributes to the portfolio of measures promoted by European Union to address enduring gender problems in science. The key issues are that 1) women continue to be a minority of researchers in Europe and globally, especially in natural sciences and technology; 2) they remain a small minority in the highest research positions, and in science decision-making in most European countries; 3) research often fails to address gender dimension as factors in science knowledge making; 4) gender bias permeates the processes involved in the valuing and accreditation of knowledge, as well as institutional and research practices.
GenPORT recognizes that progress has been made in advancing structural improvements amongst research performing and research funding organizations, as well as policy, at European, national, and institutional levels. Gender and science issues have been part of European policy discussion since the late 1990s, but large variations exist in how different countries have translated policy directives into concrete actions to tackle common problems. Some countries have a long history in addressing the gender equality issue in policy-making, whereas in some others the issue has only recently, or only marginally, been addressed at national and institutional policy level. In general, the science-policy contexts in European Member States remain very diverse they are coordinated by different institutions, with varying emphasis, or receive only marginal national-level attention in some countries. The instruments used for policy implementation, including the methods of implementing gender equality policies, also vary significantly. Policy-making process itself can be complex, involving wide range of stakeholders, both within state institutions and outside the ‘establishment’, such as civil society and non-governmental organizations. Therefore achieving change requires actions by science community guided by conventionally defined policy-makers, but also of many other types of actors and organizations.
GenPORT recognizes that the issue of assessing impacts and results of gender equality initiatives is complex. Research on, and monitoring of, the changes in how gender and science interact have demonstrated that progress towards gender equality in science is slow. It appears that the most effective initiatives have been those that focused on substantive structural change, at a deep level in organizations, or those that took a systemic approach to common issues. In general, there is a lack of shared knowledge enabling systematic comparison of the status quo across the different countries in Europe.
GenPORT recognizes the influence of the various EU-funded projects that have encouraged the efforts to promote gender as a criterion of quality in science and research, and influenced development of good practice. Recent advances in web and broadband technologies have transformed the possibilities, attitudes to, and expectations with regard to information access and use. GenPORT demonstrates the value assigned to creating and making available good quality content by opening up opportunities for sharing information and knowledge through new methods for community-oriented promotion and dissemination of knowledge. GenPORT exemplifies the emerging trend of making resources available on-line that are dramatically different in both design and intended use to the traditional academic document archives, based on a traditional ‘library’ model. Today, scientific and technology portals, are dynamic, interactive media rich and focused on the engagement of users in the social process of knowledge creation and sharing.
In the case of gender, the resources that exist to date are specialized, fragmented and dispersed across many sources: journals, books, archives, and websites. Ironically, the proliferation of a variety of on-line information sources means that, now more than ever, there is a need to coordinate access to the resources through a single location, in order to maximize their usability, share-ability, and utility for a wide range of users. When so many high-quality materials on gender-related issues are produced but dispersed across a wide variety of organizational locations and, themes, their potential value for experts and practitioners is likely to be less than optimal, and progress to advance gender equality may be slowed.
GenPORT answers the need for a comprehensively covered and easily accessed collection of high quality resources on gender and science issues, which are pooled from a wider variety of relevant sources and intended to be widely shared. GenPORT itself produces only a limited amount of new material and is intended as an on-line community resource, with members of the community as contributors, users and guardians of the relevance and quality of the content.
GenPORT contains at present resources published in the English language, though there are some in Spanish, but it can become a platform for resources in other languages as well, overseen and quality-protected by communities in other regions. The cultural and linguistic variations are important since science is a collaborative enterprise and gender issues are found everywhere, therefore GenPORT could become an important tool for promoting international gender and science discussion. This discussion started with the initial focus on “women as the problem” (to be solved whilst science was left untouched). The focus later moved to tracking “structural transformation”, i.e. promoting gender-equality across organizational and institutional practices and processes, and involving other stakeholder organizations. The latest shift has included gender in the construction of science knowledge and quality of research outcomes.
GenPORT can play an important role in clarifying and establishing shared understanding of multiple meanings assigned to gender and gendering concepts. The word “gender” is used in grammar; is often used to distinguish between women/men and girls/boys. “Gender diversity” was initially restricted to females and males but now gender scholars are working towards multiple indicators of gender diversity to include other human variations, including sex, sexuality, age, social status, etc. Empirical research on “sex differences” has a hundred year long history, ranging from biological, morphological, biomedical and psychological to social issues. In research reports, gender is often conflated with, or used interchangeably with, sex and sexual difference.
GenPORT is needed to help develop shared meanings and methods of analysis for researchers and practitioners. The current perspectives found in the gender and science discourse include: (1) distinguishing personal and collective element, gendered categorizations of people; (2) the gendering of the organizational and institutional practices and processes in science organizations. and (other) institutions; (3) the gendered construction and making of scientific knowledge. It is common in the literature to use gender to refer both to a) the processes of gendering of social and biological life, and b) the products and outcomes of those processes. Internationally, there are many contemporary debates on gender, emphasizing, for example, moving beyond binaries, multiple sexes, different feminist theories of knowledge, intersectionality, sexuality, gendering men, transgender, human-machine interfaces, ‘new materialism’, and posthumanism.
It has been the explicit goal for GenPORT to make available and emphasize these different and even conflicting approaches to gender and science and make explicit the different understandings of gender in order to facilitate the widest possible relevance and engagement with researchers, policy makers, educationalists, and wide variety of stakeholders across countries and scientific disciplines.
The specific objectives of the project have been:
1. To provide co-ordinated access to the range of high-quality research, policy and practical resources which have been developed through European and most relevant international research on gender, science, technology and innovation, through a dedicated Internet portal.
2. To increase the visibility, accessibility and usability of these resources by classifying and organizing them according to the reported needs of targeted stakeholders.
3. To promote exchange of experiences and collaboration between communities of practitioners, through a social media layer in the portal and through briefings for policy makers.
4. To make the portal and the community of practice sustainable for current and future users, in organizational, technical and financial terms.
Project Results:
The principal goal of GenPORT was to establish an Internet portal as an active on-line resource for broad range of experts and practitioners working or interested in gender and science issues. This was fully achieved, and it is available under the following URL: http://www.genderportal.eu. The portal, including all its uploaded resources, organizations., projects, events and blog-posts are freely available under agreed Terms and Conditions. Apart from the portal itself, the Consortium has achieved all the other expected deliverables, as well as several additional ones. Each of the GenPORT results is summarized below.
Result 1: The Conceptual Framework
The GenPORT Consortium under the lead of Örebro University has developed a Conceptual Framework that laid the foundation for systematic organization of conceptual categories and terms used in the area of gender and science. The Conceptual Framework was refined throughout the project. These insights have been summarized in several blog posts and video messages on the Gender & Science Blog:
http://www.genderportal.eu/blog/what-gender
https://dreambroker.com/channel/yxg15b99/gk06gtlq
http://www.genderportal.eu/blog/understandings-gender-and-implications-research
http://www.genderportal.eu/blog/sexualities-science-technology-and-innovation
The Conceptual Framework provided the basis for creating the data-structure (meta-data scheme) needed to organize content on the portal and make it easily accessible by dividing the content into Resources, Projects, Events, Organizations, and People.
Result 2: User Needs Assessment
From the start, the process of creating GenPORT relied heavily on the participation and input from a wide range of target users and stakeholders. Their input was critical throughout the whole project but specifically for assessing the needs of the community. This process included 63 semi-structured interviews, two workshops with around 30 participants, and 15 online surveys. Those involved were asked about their main information producing/using activities, gender and science concerns, what kind of information they rely on, what kind of work flows shape their current use of on-line information resources and services; and which resources they are missing and would find most useful on the portal developed by GenPORT. Key outcomes of this consultation process can be summarized as follows:
The consultation involved three stakeholder groups: those working in science, those working in gender equality areas; and those working in policy-related areas, but in many cases, individual’s activities would overlap two or all three categories. This pattern suggested an action/ issue based approach to organizing information on the portal, rather than restricted to the three categories of stakeholder groups.
The main content-related problems and concerns cited by stakeholders, not initially envisaged in GenPORT gender and science domains, include the topics of ‘awareness raising’, ‘financial and human resources’, ‘political will and commitment to gender equality in science’, ‘overcoming resistance against gender equality actions’ and the ‘provision of evidence’.
The portal can be seen to have two main functions, the first being constructing and systematically making available the evidence base in gender and science areas, and the second facilitating networking and knowledge sharing in order to carry out activities to promote gender equality in science.
Overall the most useful types of resources were seen to be Statistical Data, Case Studies, Best Practices and Research Reviews i.e. those resources that enable users construct the evidence base.
Overall, expert advice and a stakeholder directory were seen as the most useful services – thereby highlighting the portals’ role in connecting stakeholders in the field.
Science stakeholders cited Best Practices, Statistical Data and Case Studies as the top three resources they would like to see on a gender and science portal and Finding Expert Advice, a Stakeholder Directory, and the Sharing of Resources through Social Networking Sites as the most useful services.
Gender equality stakeholders cited Statistical Data, Contact Details, Case Studies and Event Information as the resources they would most like to see on a gender and science portal and Finding Expert Advice, Stakeholder Directory and a Quality Assessment of Resources as the most useful services.
Policy stakeholders cited Policy Documents, Statistical Data and Best Practices as the resources they would most like to see on a gender and science portal whilst Support for Horizon 2020 Proposers, Finding Expert Advice and a Quality Assessment of Resources as the most useful services.
The main motivations for the portal use were: easy access, clarity of information, user-friendliness, good design, regular up-dating and relevant information that cannot be found elsewhere.
The most cited obstacle to using and participating in the portal quoted by stakeholders was the lack of time. This indicates that the information that GenPORT seeks to gather from its users needs to focus on the essentials whilst services need to be designed and marketed with a view to time saving and adding value by making visible activities that gender and science stakeholders are already currently carrying out.
These insights into “user needs” informed subsequent GenPORT portal design and development work in terms of technical systems specification and design of the user interface.
Result 3: Technical and operational results
The technical specification of the portal has been produced based upon the user needs analysis described above. Previous literature regarding portal development, as well as the input from the portal advisory group contributed to the selection of the services that GenPORT should offer, as well as the overall functionality of the site.
The essential ‘back-end’ components necessary to ensure full functionality of the portal include:
(1) An ontology of entities and their relations essential for structuring the GenPORT content. The basic entities for uploading content are: (a) Persons, (b) Resources, (c) Organizations, (d) Events, and (e) Projects. These entities can be linked together through pre-defined relations. An overview of the allowed relations between specific entities is available on the Help page of GenPORT (http://www.genderportal.eu/user-guide/relation-map)
(2) A Reputation System for users and Energy System for resources. The GenPORT philosophy for curating content is purposely “loose”. This means that the portal design allows any content to be introduced on the portal as long as it does not violate the stated Terms and Conditions and Copyright Terms. In order to differentiate between levels of quality of resources, an automatic scoring system has been implemented, where certain actions carried out on the portal will assign points to a resource, thereby becoming more visible on the portal internal search rankings. The same happens with users: an internal Reputation System couples “points” earned by users with permissions to execute increasingly more complex actions (such as editing other resources or users). The reputation system used on GenPORT is described in more detail under the following URL: http://www.genderportal.eu/user-guide/reputation-system
(3) One factor of the Reputation System is the quality of the meta-data fields provided for each resource. The more meta-data fields have been filled out for each resource, the better access to the resources is achieved. An overview of the quality of the meta-data is available under the following URL:http://www.genderportal.eu/metadata-quality
Result 4: Law and Legal Measures
On the basis of the Policy environment report, GenPORT has organized initiated an overview of the European gender related legal and policy measures in a dedicated interface, available under the following address: http://www.genderportal.eu/policy-and-legal-measures
The content can be filtered according to country, the type of measure, type of intervention, and areas of application.
Result 5: Gender and Science Taxonomy (Conceptual Framework)
As part of the meta-data scheme developed by GenPORT, the Consortium has created a resources Classification Framework to assign uploaded content to the different topics covered by the gender and science theme. The Classification Framework was initially taken from the genSET “Gender and Science” domains, which were identified by a panel of science leaders, and subsequently adapted to cover the portal’s particular needs and Conceptual Framework. The Classification Framework was later renamed as “Gender and Science Taxonomy” (G&S) and the first draft was validated with experts from the wider stakeholder community. The final version is available online via a taxonomy server (http://www.genderportal.eu/tematres/vocab/index.php) , or as categories for browsing the GenPORT content (http://www.genderportal.eu/landing-search)
The G&S Taxonomy provides a thematic overview of the central issues regarding gender and science and has been already used by EIGE in order to provide links between EIGEs Glossary terms and GenPORTs Taxonomy. The G&S Taxonomy is complemented by the wider Meta-data Scheme used on GenPORT. Importantly, gender equality policy and legal measures are classified according to different types of interventions, available through URL: http://www.genderportal.eu/policy-and-legal-measures
Result 6: Policy environment report
An important GenPORT deliverable involved the production of Policy Briefs. This work of the Consortium was led by GESIS and resulted in a report on the national policy environments across the EU Member States. The purpose of the report is to summarize the key ‘gender and science’ policy making infrastructures in Europe by reviewing the role of policy actors within the national science policy contexts, the issues that policies at different levels are addressing, and the key mechanisms by which they are doing so. The analysis of the policy environments informs all policy-related tasks of GenPORT. The analysis presented is based on data gathered by GenPORT partners and covers the following countries: Austria, Belgium, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Lithuania, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. The main findings are:
While all European Member States should have transposed EU directives into national legislation to ensure equal opportunities and treatment for women and men in the fields of employment, working conditions and social security, severe gaps occur between the declaration of policies and their implementation in the research sector specifically. This is confirmed by the fact that progress towards representative equality has been slow, with notable exceptions such as in some of the Western European and the Nordic countries.
The scope and the regulatory density of gender equality legislation differ to a great extent in the European member states. Due to the EU gender equality and anti-discrimination framework, basic provisions on gender equality, equal treatment/opportunity and anti-discrimination are in force. Apart from this, the main focus lies on the gender balance in decision-making and the reconciliation of work and family.
Concerning higher education legislation, there is a great gap between those countries without any gender specific regulations and those countries which have a wide range of provisions on gender balance, gender in education and research, gender equality plans, gender officers, gender budgeting etc.
Gender mainstreaming is the leading strategy adopted by the EU Institutions and most of the Member States for achieving gender equality in all areas of policy-making, including the research, higher education and innovation sector. Despite official commitment to mainstreaming gender, instituting a (national) infrastructure for realizing equality between women and men is still a strategic objective in many national systems, thus not (fully) in place.
The policy approach of mainstreaming gender has led some countries to disperse responsibilities for gender equality without necessarily providing for adequate diffusion of gender expertise.
National actors make use of hierarchical, procedural and evaluative steering instruments as well as combinations of those three types of policy steering for enhancing the effectiveness of policies.
According to the data gathered, in all countries, regardless of the type of cooperation between funding agencies and governmental actors, funding agencies do not operate actively in the field of gender and science without governmental actors being active in the country too. However, in some countries, interventions in the field of gender and science in the research system are promoted solely by governmental actors without the active involvement of research funding agencies or other stakeholders.
Governmental actors mostly hold mandates for monitoring and coordinating equality measures, as well as in implementing instruments in gender equality on the national level.
Depending on the political structures of the different countries in general terms, and sometimes specifically to the higher education sector, individual actors in gender and science operate nationally, regionally or locally. Regional governmental actors operate in the Nordic region under the framework of Nordic Council of Ministers, coordinating, among other policy fields, the research collaboration as well as gender equality policy collaboration of the five Nordic countries and related autonomous areas.
All in all, the cross-country disparities between EU and associated countries regarding both the number of gender studies programs and gender research centers, and the proportion of women in grade A positions draw a paradox picture: whereas the She Figures statistics show that women’s representation in grade A positions is highest among Central and Eastern European countries such as Romania and Latvia, and lowest among Western and to some extent Southern European countries, e.g. Belgium or the Netherlands; when it comes to the potential of gender expertise by country, indicated by the number of gender studies programs and gender research centers, we see a rather different picture. The numbers of gender studies programs and gender research centers is relatively high in Western and North European countries (and Greece from Southern Europe as an exception), thus the data indicate the likelihood of there being a relatively high degree of gender knowledge and gender competence to consider gender aspects in research as well as in policy making. On the other hand, a high proportion of women in grade A positions does not necessarily mean there is a strong base for gender in research and thus good availability of gender competence.
Although the analysis of the 91 instruments shows that the ‘fixing the institutions’-approach has been implemented in many EU countries (15 of 21), the overwhelming amount of career advancement measures that exclusively address women suggests that the ‘fixing the women’-approach still persists. Although instruments focusing upon women’s recruitment, retention and career progression are still very prominent among most countries (16), strategies for structural change are very common, too.
Numerous transformative approaches in the policy instruments we found combine strategies for structural change with career advancement actions, for example, but target and provide incentives for organizations. This reveals that (women’s) inclusion or affirmative actions can certainly be part of a transformative approach implemented at the institutional level. Interestingly, in some countries very different measures with different approaches exist simultaneously, which include different targets, differently addressed genders and different types of practices. In these cases, a complex approach becomes visible and measures to advance, for example, are complemented – to different extents - by institutional and cultural changes and vice versa.
The report is available under the following address:
http://www.genderportal.eu/sites/default/files/resource_pool/GenPORT_analysis%20of%20policy%20environments%20report_0.pdf
Result 7: Policy briefs
The GenPORT Consortium has produced 26 Policy Briefs, which target national-level policy makers and institutional science leaders in research performing organizations (RPOs) and in research funding organizations (RFOs). All policy briefs have been updated twice, incorporating the results of corresponding online e-discussions, and evolving policy landscape.
The latest version of the policy briefs are available online under the following URL: http://www.genderportal.eu/blog/genport-policy-briefs-now-online
Twenty of the policy briefs are grouped around five themes: Recruitment and Promotion, Gender Equality Plans, Gender Dimension in Research Content (RPOs), Gender Dimension in Research Content (RFOs) and Gender Balance in Decision-Making. They are targeted at different country groups according to levels of implementation as reported by research organizations and the presence or absence of measures at the national level.
The other six policy briefs focus on: Tackling Sexual Harassment, Intersectionality, Securing Top-level Support for Gender Equality, Building Gender Competence and Knowledge, Statistics and Methodology, and How to Achieve Successful Implementation and Combat Resistance. These thematic briefs are not targeted at specific country groups because the topics address issues of general concern.
In the EU policy landscape, the European Research Area (ERA) is at the heart of Europe 2020 strategy and its Innovation Union (IU) policy flagship. One of the five ERA priorities is gender equality and gender mainstreaming in research. The 2012 ERA Communication invites Member states to create a legal and policy environment conducive to gender equality and mainstreaming through: (a) removing barriers including legal barriers to the recruitment, retention and career progression of female researchers, (b) addressing gender imbalances in decision making processes, (c) strengthening the gender dimension in research programs.
It also invites member states to foster partnerships with research funders, research organizations and universities in order to push for institutional and cultural change on gender through charters, performance agreements and awards whilst ensuring that at least 40% of the under-represented sex should participate in committees.
Stakeholder organizations in research are invited to carry out “institutional change relating to HR management, funding, decision- making and research programs through Gender Equality Plans which aim to (a) conduct impact assessment / audits of procedures and practices to identify gender bias, (b) implement innovative strategies to correct any bias, (c) set targets and monitor progress via indicators”.
The European Commission has conducted two surveys (2012/3 and 2014) to measure the level of progress made by research organizations in the EU in implementing the policy priorities of the ERA. The ERA surveys include questions that explore the actions taken by research organizations to promote gender equality.
The twenty policy briefs of GenPORT are structured according to the classification of countries according to the ERA facts and figures 2014 report. Two variables define the clusters. The first regards self- reported levels of implementation (RPOs and RFOs) per country compared to the EU average - for example the percentage of RPOs that are implementing any recruitment and promotion policies for female researchers in a given country- compared to the EU average. The second variable concerns the presence (or not) of national level policy measures in this field according to the European Commission. On this basis five groups of countries- could be discerned: (1) Implementation above EU average, measures identified; (2) Implementation above EU average; (3) Implementation below EU average, measures identified; (4) Implementation below EU average, (5) No implementation.
For each of the policy areas: Recruitment and Promotion Measures; Adoption of Gender Equality Plans in RPOs; Gender Dimension in Research Content (RPOs); Gender Dimension in Research Content (RFOs); Gender-Balance in Decision-Making – four country groups have been identified. In all policy areas (except Gender Dimension in Research Content [RFOs]) policy briefs are targeted at those four country groups with implementation above/ below EU average with/ without policy measures. In the case of Gender Dimension in Research Content (RFOs) - we have included the group of countries identified as having 'no implementation'- whilst 'frequent support above EU average' – is absent - as no country forms part of this group.
The policy briefs are structured on the basis of the findings obtained from an ERA survey. The limitations of the survey include that it was a self-assessment so - the implementation figures are based on those organizations. that reported they were implementing some gender equality measures. It only concerns those RPOs who answered the ERA survey (they employ 515.000 researchers - around 20% of total EU researchers). The sample for the ERA Survey was not randomly selected and the results have not been weighted due to a lack of substantiated information about the sample frame and the whole population of RPOs. This means producing inferential statistics about the wider population is not possible.
Despite these limitations, structuring the policy briefs along these lines meant that we were able to cover a range of progress levels, from ‘proactive’ countries to ‘inactive’ countries.
Analysis shows that gender equality policies in public research and policy developments over the last five years have resulted in a widening gap between proactive and relatively inactive countries (France is the only country which has clearly improved its position from relatively inactive to proactive). There is a real need for policy briefs targeted specifically at the group of countries characterized as ‘inactive’ – in an attempt to reduce this policy gap.
The GenPORT policy briefs provide examples of legislation, policies, initiatives and measures that can be taken at both the national and institutional levels. These policy briefs are designed to be read by national level policy makers and institutional science leaders and have been updated twice during the course of the project to take the findings of new research into account.
Result 8: Research Synthesis
The GenPORT consortium has produced 6 Research Synthesis spanning the following topics: (1) Education and Training, (2) Academic and Science Careers, (3) Institutional Practices and Processes, (4) Gender in Research Content and Knowledge Production, (5) Policy Setting and Implementation and (6) Historical Perspectives and Future Scenarios. The purpose of these documents is to provide an overview of the current debates in these areas and highlight the relevant bibliographic references, as well as provide links to further reading.
For the final update of the Research Synthesis, partners requested comments from colleagues outside of Europe on their Research Synthesis. This helped disseminate GenPORT and the Research Syntheses in and outside of Europe. Contributions from invited experts were either integrated into the research synthesis (RS1, RS5, RS6) or developed as blog posts (RS2, RS3). For the Gender in Research Content and Knowledge Production Research Synthesis it was more pertinent to circulate the findings to the chairs and rapporteurs of the Expert Advisory Groups on each H2020 societal challenge, to the Cabinet of Commissioner Moedas, the European Parliament’s FEMM and STOA Committees, and to key EU experts and advisers, such as Hans Borchgrevink who are involved in policy decisions on EURAXESS and Marie Sklodowska Curie Actions.
The Research Synthesis are available under the following links on GenPORT:
Education and Training (RS1):
http://www.genderportal.eu/resources/education-and-training-genport-research-synthesis-1
Academic and Science Careers (RS2):
http://www.genderportal.eu/resources/academic-and-science-careers-genport-research-synthesis-2
Institutional Practices and Processes (RS3)
http://www.genderportal.eu/resources/institutional-practices-and-processes-genport-research-synthesis-3
Gender in Research Content and Knowledge Production (RS4)
http://www.genderportal.eu/resources/gender-research-content-and-knowledge-production-genport-research-synthesis-4
Policy Setting and Implementation (RS5)
http://www.genderportal.eu/resources/policy-setting-and-implementation-genport-research-synthesis-5
Histories and Future Perspectives (RS6)
http://www.genderportal.eu/resources/historical-perspectives-and-future-scenarios-genport-research-synthesis-6
Result 9: Expert to Expert Directory
The GenPORT project involved four Concertation Meetings designed to enable sharing of experiences, knowledge, and feedback on the development of the portal. The 2nd Concertation Meeting has been organized (November 2015) in order to drive forward the creation of an Expert-to-Expert directory on GenPORT to create visibility of gender experts across the different scientific disciplines, which was needed to help deliver the gender equality objectives of Horizon 2020.
Upon registration, new users can indicate if they want to join the Expert Directory. Specific input fields are provided for interested users to document their expertise in their respective areas – these input fields were derived from the consultations enabled by the 2nd Concertation Meeting.
Interested third parties can easily scan for experts in their respective scientific disciplines.
The listing is available under the following URL: http://www.genderportal.eu/people
Result 10: E-Discussions
During the course of the project, the Consortium has utilized the portal to organize seven e-discussions. Domain experts were invited to contribute and lead the e-discussions, facilitated in each case by Consortium partners. The result of these discussions can be consulted online under the following links:
Discussion 1: Familienfreudnlichkeit and Vereinbarkeit in der Wissenschaft (http://www.genderportal.eu/group/online-diskussion-familienfreundlichkeit-und-vereinbarkeit-der-wissenschaft)
Discussion 2: Incorporating a Gender Perspective into H2020 Proposals (http://www.genderportal.eu/group/incorporating-gender-perspective-h2020-research-proposals)
Discussion 3: Gender Dimension in Research Content and Process – Research Funding Organization (http://www.genderportal.eu/group/gender-dimension-research-content-and-process-research-funding-organisations-perspectives)
Discussion 4: The Implementation of Gender Equality Plans (http://www.genderportal.eu/group/e-discussion-implementation-gender-equality-plans)
Discussion 5: Recruitment and Promotion of Women Researchers (http://www.genderportal.eu/group/e-discussion-recruitment-and-promotion-women-researchers)
Discussion 6: Gender Dimension in Research Content and Process – Research Performing Organization (http://www.genderportal.eu/group/gender-dimension-research-content-organisations)
Discussion 7: Gender Balance in Decision Making (http://www.genderportal.eu/group/e-discussion-gender-balance-decision-making-research-organisations)
Result 11: Gender & Science Blog
In order to promote the portal as a tool for holding contemporary discussions regarding gender and science, as well as facilitating entry points to the vast amount of different resources on the portal, the Consortium has created a Blog section on the portal. At the time of writing this report there are more than 115 blog posts available, many of them pertaining to dedicated topics such as
(1) Recommended Resources (http://www.genderportal.eu/blog-categories/recommended-resources) where Consortium member present a selection of high-quality resources on certain topics such as Anti-Gender Bias Training, Raising awareness or policy analysis and evaluation among others.
(2) Video interviews. The project has also produced a series of video interviews with selected experts of the gender and science community in Europe and beyond. These video interviews are available under the following URL: http://www.genderportal.eu/blog-categories/video-interviews Different topics are addressed such as the gender productivity gap in science, the gender dimension in physics, gender sensitive environmental monitoring, or the gender dimension in epidemiology among many others. Overall, more than 26 video interviews are available through the blog or the Vimeo Channel of the project https://vimeo.com/user45930980
(3) Female role models. Through a collaboration with artist Jennifer Mondfrans, several blog entries introduced the live of famous women scientists, including Irene Curie, Henrietta Swan Leavitt, or Rosalind Franklin among others. The dedicated blog entries are available under the following URL http://www.genderportal.eu/blog-categories/artist-residence
Result 12: Community engagement and portal sustainability
The community that the GenPORT portal is designed to serve is very broad, international, and cross-sectorial, a fact that was apparent during the launch-event of the portal.. The launch event was organized in two parts. The first part targeted Europe’s policy makers, since gender equality is one of the core values of the European Union, and took place at the European Parliament. It was organized in collaboration with the STOA Committee. The second part targeted the broad science community and was designed to demonstrate the value of having the portal as an access point to normally widely scattered resources and as a reporting place for organizations and project that develop or apply measures to advance gender equality. A sustainability plan was developed which perceives four types of users: Strategic Partners who can ensure financial sustainability; Sustainability Partners who can ensure quality of the content; Contributors of resources, who ensure that new content is continuously added, and Community User who will be utilizing the portal. Clearly, these four categories are not exclusive. Argumentation table was developed with the reasons for and the benefits of being involved in GenPORT in one of these roles, which provides information for marketing the portal. Information was collected on target organizations in each category for marketing GenPORT. A marketing flier was designed to support the marketing activities. A list of ‘business’ options were identified that could be the source of income to cover costs of maintaining and further developing and expanding the portal.
The Consortium explored different legal formats that would enable GenPORT to operate after the project ends. The new entity will operate as a not-for-profit organization but with some services that will have the capacity to produce income, for example:
1. Create a range of specially designed products and services that the community needs and are able to pay for, e.g. responding to a request from Horizon 2020 consortium for a synthesis review of scientific literature on the topic of their proposal
2. Tap into suitable sources of project-type grant/sponsorship funding opportunities, e.g. science communication grants from the Robert Bosch Foundation, Wellcome Trust, Elsevier Foundation
3. Engage in collaborative partnerships with major stakeholders who have a gender mainstreaming policy agenda and a budget to achieve it which may allow ‘sponsorship’ type relationship with GenPORT, e.g. Science Europe, NordForsk, L’Oreal
4. Crowd-source, i.e. appealing for contribution to the GenPORT community of users
5. Membership fees structured around level of access to GenPORT resources, e.g. ‘free’ when accessing resources contributed freely by the community, but ‘charged’ if the platform is used for particular tasks, for example an organization or a project may wish to use it to conduct a survey, a focus group meetings etc.
Create an expert ‘market place’ to enable users obtain fee-based expert support for specific problems, e.g. a consortium preparing H2020 proposal may wish to engage an expert to help formulate a plan to integrate gender dimension into the project’s work plan.
For the immediate future, the portal will be sustained by the coordinating institution UOC for a limited period of time in order to facilitate the transition to a self-sustaining format.
Potential Impact:
The GenPORT portal provides a gateway to gender and science resources, which otherwise may be hard to find as they are dispersed across many Internet sites, journals, books etc. Therefore, the first impact is on building awareness and accessibility to knowledge in gender issues in science.
The portal is first and foremost community sourced, and will be maintained with the help of the community. Therefore, the second impact is that it acts as a cross-sectoral community builder and facilitator and supporter of emerging community of practice.
As Illustration 1 demonstrates, there has been a constant growth in terms of users registered on the portal as well as resources uploaded and shared. At the end of the project, the portal counts +1100 resources, +500 users, +260 organizations and +180 events. Taking Google Analytics as a further success indicator, the portal has received since the start of the analytics service (22.7.2014) a total of 176,516 page views or 43,532 users. The average pageviews per month is about +5000.
Most importantly, the project has established itself as a prime communication channel on Twitter with more than 1000 followers. In comparison with other Gender and Science related Twitter accounts (see Illustration 2), GenPORT comes in fourth after the L'Oreal initiative, the American Women in Science Association and the Gender Summit. This establishes the portal and its Twitter account as a primary dissemination channel for the gender and science community. In contrast to other accounts, this dissemination channel is available to the community as such: any registered user of the portal can disseminate their resources and events through the GenPORT Twitter account.
As these numbers indicate, GenPORT provides a central communication channel for disseminating existing projects results and outcomes. Therefore the third impact is on facilitating more effective dissemination of new research, and increasing the visibility, accessibility and usability of existing resources.
The portal uses a systematic methods for organizing and accessing resources. Therefore the fourth impact is in advancing coordinated access to high-quality research, policy and practical resources developed through extensive consultation process.
The portal technical aspects combine several innovative techniques. Therefore the fifth impact is on advancing European digital capacity to promote international research on gender, science, technology and innovation.
Impact achieved beyond the project and Consortium partners
Overall, the project achieved a high level of visibility through the organization of 4 Concertation Meetings and participation in key events in the gender and science community organized by others such as the Gender Summits. Especially in conjunction with the Gender Summit, GenPORT has reached audiences well beyond Europe, when Gender Summit took place in Mexico, South Korea and Japan.
A key event certainly was the official launch of the portal, which took place at the European Parliament during a working breakfast hosted by the Science and Technology Options Assessment (STOA) Panel, and attended by MEPs representing the Women's Rights and Gender Equality (FEMM) committees, on the 21st April 2016 in Brussels. STOA’s mission includes providing Parliament’s Committees and other parliamentary bodies concerned with independent, high-quality and scientifically impartial studies and information for the assessment of the impact of possibly introducing or promoting new technologies and identifying, from the technological point of view, the options for the best courses of action to take. The breakfast was hosted by Terry Reintke MEP (FEMM Committee member) and Eva Kaili MEP (STOA First Vice-Chair) and chaired by Mairead McGuinness, EP Vice-President responsible for STOA who gave insightful introductions and reflections as to how GenPORT could support their work. 64 participants, many from within the Parliament joined the 5 MEPs chairing the breakfast meeting. Registration was closed early as capacity was reached within a week of opening.
An important impact not anticipated at the beginning of the project concerns the development of the Gender & Science Taxonomy. The taxonomy is a key instrument in order to provide structured access to gender and science resources on the portal. Its importance lies in the fact that it provides an overview of the current topics that are associated with gender and science and hence provides an important knowledge base about this field itself. Others can draw upon this knowledge to structure related fields of expertise and create visibility of experiences and knowledge related to gender.
In fact, the project has been contacted by software development project from Cornell University (USA) in order to use the taxonomy in a project related to agriculture and gender. However, the importance of the Gender and Science Taxonomy also lies in the fact that it provides the basis for cooperation with other resources providers working in gender and science. The European Institute of Gender Equality thus is using the G&S Taxonomy provided by GenPORT in order to interlink key terms of its Glossary. This allows in the future not only to explore resources classified under certain terms on both sites, but also has the potential to automatically exchange meta-data of resources – which means, that users can access content across sites easily.
The importance of the Gender & Science Taxonomy has also been emphasized during the 4th Concertation Meeting, where gender experts, policy makers and library experts agreed on the need for a shared taxonomy to further develop the inter-linkage of resource and information provides across Europe. Especially the need for a translation of taxonomies was underlined and should be continued in the future.
Regarding the wider societal impact, GenPORT has managed to gather 23 Portal Ambassadors (http://www.genderportal.eu/ambassadors). These ambassadors come from different scientific disciplines and represent different world regions and actively support the platform, advocating for its use in their respective networks and activities. The dissemination effect of the portal ambassadors is considerable given the fact that the invited experts are high profile individuals not only in their respective scientific areas but also to the wider public.
Furthermore, GenPORT has helped to establish e-discussions as a viable format for organizing exchanges between experts and the wider public around the globe. Overall 7 e-discussions were organized (see previous section). The feedback from participants were overall positively surprised. Participants described the format as interesting and well suited to discuss contemporary issues on gender and science relatively rapidly and “cheaply”. Other than disseminating knowledge in the form of reports and other digital documents, online discussions provide a more lively and direct manner to exchange experiences and generate an online reference to the topics discussed. The e-discussions have been a primary channel for addressing the third objective of the portal, namely to promote exchange of experiences and collaboration between communities of practitioners.
List of Websites:
http://www.genderportal.eu
GenPORT is an Internet portal where communities of experts, practitioners, policy-makers and researchers can share knowledge and engage in collaborative actions to advance understanding of how gender and science influence one another and impact on society. The portal was constructed over a period of 4 years (2013-2017) through a process of extensive consultation with many target user groups in Europe and beyond. The GenPORT community is made up of organizations and individuals working across the globe for gender equality and excellence in science, technology and innovation. This covers all sciences – natural and social sciences, and humanities.
GenPORT provides a platform for organizations and individuals to showcase their work, and to act as a gateway to a wealth of research resources, policy information, practical materials, and much more. Constantly evolving as a destination to wide range of online information sources and services, GenPORT future will be shaped by the activities and contributions of its community members. The core aim is to facilitate the exchange of experiences, knowledge, research materials and tools, and to foster collaboration by advancing research, informing policy, and disseminating practical interventions in pursuit of lasting gender equality improvements in science and society.
GenPORT offers to its users a variety of benefits not available elsewhere in one location. As a user you can find on GenPORT:
* Opportunities to join in a community-wide effort to develop, share, and apply quality research and practices addressing gender issues in science (broadly defined)
* Gender experts who understand your field and can advise on the relevance of the gender dimension in your research, or when planning a Horizon 2020 proposal
* A wealth of gender in science resources to explore ideas, important findings, and best practices relevant to different research topics, or in relation to specific Horizon 2020 calls
* Evidence of differences in need or preferences among potential target users of your research to design effective, gender sensitive and impact-creating dissemination and outreach strategies.
* An infrastructure and services for freely sharing knowledge and experiences through e-discussions, blog-posts, and a consolidated gender and science taxonomy.
At the end of the project , the Portal offers +500 users, +1130 resources, +180 events, +270 organizations, +110 Blog Posts. In addition, the project Consortium has produced a series of fresh resources and services, including:
* 26 Policy Briefs reports
* 6 Research Synthesis reports
* +26 videos with expert interviews (published on the GenPORT Blog).
* Gender & Science Taxonomy (to structure resources and policy measures related to gender and science and enable effective sharing with other online services)
* Directory of experts who combine knowledge of gender and science issues
Project Context and Objectives:
GenPORT contributes to the portfolio of measures promoted by European Union to address enduring gender problems in science. The key issues are that 1) women continue to be a minority of researchers in Europe and globally, especially in natural sciences and technology; 2) they remain a small minority in the highest research positions, and in science decision-making in most European countries; 3) research often fails to address gender dimension as factors in science knowledge making; 4) gender bias permeates the processes involved in the valuing and accreditation of knowledge, as well as institutional and research practices.
GenPORT recognizes that progress has been made in advancing structural improvements amongst research performing and research funding organizations, as well as policy, at European, national, and institutional levels. Gender and science issues have been part of European policy discussion since the late 1990s, but large variations exist in how different countries have translated policy directives into concrete actions to tackle common problems. Some countries have a long history in addressing the gender equality issue in policy-making, whereas in some others the issue has only recently, or only marginally, been addressed at national and institutional policy level. In general, the science-policy contexts in European Member States remain very diverse they are coordinated by different institutions, with varying emphasis, or receive only marginal national-level attention in some countries. The instruments used for policy implementation, including the methods of implementing gender equality policies, also vary significantly. Policy-making process itself can be complex, involving wide range of stakeholders, both within state institutions and outside the ‘establishment’, such as civil society and non-governmental organizations. Therefore achieving change requires actions by science community guided by conventionally defined policy-makers, but also of many other types of actors and organizations.
GenPORT recognizes that the issue of assessing impacts and results of gender equality initiatives is complex. Research on, and monitoring of, the changes in how gender and science interact have demonstrated that progress towards gender equality in science is slow. It appears that the most effective initiatives have been those that focused on substantive structural change, at a deep level in organizations, or those that took a systemic approach to common issues. In general, there is a lack of shared knowledge enabling systematic comparison of the status quo across the different countries in Europe.
GenPORT recognizes the influence of the various EU-funded projects that have encouraged the efforts to promote gender as a criterion of quality in science and research, and influenced development of good practice. Recent advances in web and broadband technologies have transformed the possibilities, attitudes to, and expectations with regard to information access and use. GenPORT demonstrates the value assigned to creating and making available good quality content by opening up opportunities for sharing information and knowledge through new methods for community-oriented promotion and dissemination of knowledge. GenPORT exemplifies the emerging trend of making resources available on-line that are dramatically different in both design and intended use to the traditional academic document archives, based on a traditional ‘library’ model. Today, scientific and technology portals, are dynamic, interactive media rich and focused on the engagement of users in the social process of knowledge creation and sharing.
In the case of gender, the resources that exist to date are specialized, fragmented and dispersed across many sources: journals, books, archives, and websites. Ironically, the proliferation of a variety of on-line information sources means that, now more than ever, there is a need to coordinate access to the resources through a single location, in order to maximize their usability, share-ability, and utility for a wide range of users. When so many high-quality materials on gender-related issues are produced but dispersed across a wide variety of organizational locations and, themes, their potential value for experts and practitioners is likely to be less than optimal, and progress to advance gender equality may be slowed.
GenPORT answers the need for a comprehensively covered and easily accessed collection of high quality resources on gender and science issues, which are pooled from a wider variety of relevant sources and intended to be widely shared. GenPORT itself produces only a limited amount of new material and is intended as an on-line community resource, with members of the community as contributors, users and guardians of the relevance and quality of the content.
GenPORT contains at present resources published in the English language, though there are some in Spanish, but it can become a platform for resources in other languages as well, overseen and quality-protected by communities in other regions. The cultural and linguistic variations are important since science is a collaborative enterprise and gender issues are found everywhere, therefore GenPORT could become an important tool for promoting international gender and science discussion. This discussion started with the initial focus on “women as the problem” (to be solved whilst science was left untouched). The focus later moved to tracking “structural transformation”, i.e. promoting gender-equality across organizational and institutional practices and processes, and involving other stakeholder organizations. The latest shift has included gender in the construction of science knowledge and quality of research outcomes.
GenPORT can play an important role in clarifying and establishing shared understanding of multiple meanings assigned to gender and gendering concepts. The word “gender” is used in grammar; is often used to distinguish between women/men and girls/boys. “Gender diversity” was initially restricted to females and males but now gender scholars are working towards multiple indicators of gender diversity to include other human variations, including sex, sexuality, age, social status, etc. Empirical research on “sex differences” has a hundred year long history, ranging from biological, morphological, biomedical and psychological to social issues. In research reports, gender is often conflated with, or used interchangeably with, sex and sexual difference.
GenPORT is needed to help develop shared meanings and methods of analysis for researchers and practitioners. The current perspectives found in the gender and science discourse include: (1) distinguishing personal and collective element, gendered categorizations of people; (2) the gendering of the organizational and institutional practices and processes in science organizations. and (other) institutions; (3) the gendered construction and making of scientific knowledge. It is common in the literature to use gender to refer both to a) the processes of gendering of social and biological life, and b) the products and outcomes of those processes. Internationally, there are many contemporary debates on gender, emphasizing, for example, moving beyond binaries, multiple sexes, different feminist theories of knowledge, intersectionality, sexuality, gendering men, transgender, human-machine interfaces, ‘new materialism’, and posthumanism.
It has been the explicit goal for GenPORT to make available and emphasize these different and even conflicting approaches to gender and science and make explicit the different understandings of gender in order to facilitate the widest possible relevance and engagement with researchers, policy makers, educationalists, and wide variety of stakeholders across countries and scientific disciplines.
The specific objectives of the project have been:
1. To provide co-ordinated access to the range of high-quality research, policy and practical resources which have been developed through European and most relevant international research on gender, science, technology and innovation, through a dedicated Internet portal.
2. To increase the visibility, accessibility and usability of these resources by classifying and organizing them according to the reported needs of targeted stakeholders.
3. To promote exchange of experiences and collaboration between communities of practitioners, through a social media layer in the portal and through briefings for policy makers.
4. To make the portal and the community of practice sustainable for current and future users, in organizational, technical and financial terms.
Project Results:
The principal goal of GenPORT was to establish an Internet portal as an active on-line resource for broad range of experts and practitioners working or interested in gender and science issues. This was fully achieved, and it is available under the following URL: http://www.genderportal.eu. The portal, including all its uploaded resources, organizations., projects, events and blog-posts are freely available under agreed Terms and Conditions. Apart from the portal itself, the Consortium has achieved all the other expected deliverables, as well as several additional ones. Each of the GenPORT results is summarized below.
Result 1: The Conceptual Framework
The GenPORT Consortium under the lead of Örebro University has developed a Conceptual Framework that laid the foundation for systematic organization of conceptual categories and terms used in the area of gender and science. The Conceptual Framework was refined throughout the project. These insights have been summarized in several blog posts and video messages on the Gender & Science Blog:
http://www.genderportal.eu/blog/what-gender
https://dreambroker.com/channel/yxg15b99/gk06gtlq
http://www.genderportal.eu/blog/understandings-gender-and-implications-research
http://www.genderportal.eu/blog/sexualities-science-technology-and-innovation
The Conceptual Framework provided the basis for creating the data-structure (meta-data scheme) needed to organize content on the portal and make it easily accessible by dividing the content into Resources, Projects, Events, Organizations, and People.
Result 2: User Needs Assessment
From the start, the process of creating GenPORT relied heavily on the participation and input from a wide range of target users and stakeholders. Their input was critical throughout the whole project but specifically for assessing the needs of the community. This process included 63 semi-structured interviews, two workshops with around 30 participants, and 15 online surveys. Those involved were asked about their main information producing/using activities, gender and science concerns, what kind of information they rely on, what kind of work flows shape their current use of on-line information resources and services; and which resources they are missing and would find most useful on the portal developed by GenPORT. Key outcomes of this consultation process can be summarized as follows:
The consultation involved three stakeholder groups: those working in science, those working in gender equality areas; and those working in policy-related areas, but in many cases, individual’s activities would overlap two or all three categories. This pattern suggested an action/ issue based approach to organizing information on the portal, rather than restricted to the three categories of stakeholder groups.
The main content-related problems and concerns cited by stakeholders, not initially envisaged in GenPORT gender and science domains, include the topics of ‘awareness raising’, ‘financial and human resources’, ‘political will and commitment to gender equality in science’, ‘overcoming resistance against gender equality actions’ and the ‘provision of evidence’.
The portal can be seen to have two main functions, the first being constructing and systematically making available the evidence base in gender and science areas, and the second facilitating networking and knowledge sharing in order to carry out activities to promote gender equality in science.
Overall the most useful types of resources were seen to be Statistical Data, Case Studies, Best Practices and Research Reviews i.e. those resources that enable users construct the evidence base.
Overall, expert advice and a stakeholder directory were seen as the most useful services – thereby highlighting the portals’ role in connecting stakeholders in the field.
Science stakeholders cited Best Practices, Statistical Data and Case Studies as the top three resources they would like to see on a gender and science portal and Finding Expert Advice, a Stakeholder Directory, and the Sharing of Resources through Social Networking Sites as the most useful services.
Gender equality stakeholders cited Statistical Data, Contact Details, Case Studies and Event Information as the resources they would most like to see on a gender and science portal and Finding Expert Advice, Stakeholder Directory and a Quality Assessment of Resources as the most useful services.
Policy stakeholders cited Policy Documents, Statistical Data and Best Practices as the resources they would most like to see on a gender and science portal whilst Support for Horizon 2020 Proposers, Finding Expert Advice and a Quality Assessment of Resources as the most useful services.
The main motivations for the portal use were: easy access, clarity of information, user-friendliness, good design, regular up-dating and relevant information that cannot be found elsewhere.
The most cited obstacle to using and participating in the portal quoted by stakeholders was the lack of time. This indicates that the information that GenPORT seeks to gather from its users needs to focus on the essentials whilst services need to be designed and marketed with a view to time saving and adding value by making visible activities that gender and science stakeholders are already currently carrying out.
These insights into “user needs” informed subsequent GenPORT portal design and development work in terms of technical systems specification and design of the user interface.
Result 3: Technical and operational results
The technical specification of the portal has been produced based upon the user needs analysis described above. Previous literature regarding portal development, as well as the input from the portal advisory group contributed to the selection of the services that GenPORT should offer, as well as the overall functionality of the site.
The essential ‘back-end’ components necessary to ensure full functionality of the portal include:
(1) An ontology of entities and their relations essential for structuring the GenPORT content. The basic entities for uploading content are: (a) Persons, (b) Resources, (c) Organizations, (d) Events, and (e) Projects. These entities can be linked together through pre-defined relations. An overview of the allowed relations between specific entities is available on the Help page of GenPORT (http://www.genderportal.eu/user-guide/relation-map)
(2) A Reputation System for users and Energy System for resources. The GenPORT philosophy for curating content is purposely “loose”. This means that the portal design allows any content to be introduced on the portal as long as it does not violate the stated Terms and Conditions and Copyright Terms. In order to differentiate between levels of quality of resources, an automatic scoring system has been implemented, where certain actions carried out on the portal will assign points to a resource, thereby becoming more visible on the portal internal search rankings. The same happens with users: an internal Reputation System couples “points” earned by users with permissions to execute increasingly more complex actions (such as editing other resources or users). The reputation system used on GenPORT is described in more detail under the following URL: http://www.genderportal.eu/user-guide/reputation-system
(3) One factor of the Reputation System is the quality of the meta-data fields provided for each resource. The more meta-data fields have been filled out for each resource, the better access to the resources is achieved. An overview of the quality of the meta-data is available under the following URL:http://www.genderportal.eu/metadata-quality
Result 4: Law and Legal Measures
On the basis of the Policy environment report, GenPORT has organized initiated an overview of the European gender related legal and policy measures in a dedicated interface, available under the following address: http://www.genderportal.eu/policy-and-legal-measures
The content can be filtered according to country, the type of measure, type of intervention, and areas of application.
Result 5: Gender and Science Taxonomy (Conceptual Framework)
As part of the meta-data scheme developed by GenPORT, the Consortium has created a resources Classification Framework to assign uploaded content to the different topics covered by the gender and science theme. The Classification Framework was initially taken from the genSET “Gender and Science” domains, which were identified by a panel of science leaders, and subsequently adapted to cover the portal’s particular needs and Conceptual Framework. The Classification Framework was later renamed as “Gender and Science Taxonomy” (G&S) and the first draft was validated with experts from the wider stakeholder community. The final version is available online via a taxonomy server (http://www.genderportal.eu/tematres/vocab/index.php) , or as categories for browsing the GenPORT content (http://www.genderportal.eu/landing-search)
The G&S Taxonomy provides a thematic overview of the central issues regarding gender and science and has been already used by EIGE in order to provide links between EIGEs Glossary terms and GenPORTs Taxonomy. The G&S Taxonomy is complemented by the wider Meta-data Scheme used on GenPORT. Importantly, gender equality policy and legal measures are classified according to different types of interventions, available through URL: http://www.genderportal.eu/policy-and-legal-measures
Result 6: Policy environment report
An important GenPORT deliverable involved the production of Policy Briefs. This work of the Consortium was led by GESIS and resulted in a report on the national policy environments across the EU Member States. The purpose of the report is to summarize the key ‘gender and science’ policy making infrastructures in Europe by reviewing the role of policy actors within the national science policy contexts, the issues that policies at different levels are addressing, and the key mechanisms by which they are doing so. The analysis of the policy environments informs all policy-related tasks of GenPORT. The analysis presented is based on data gathered by GenPORT partners and covers the following countries: Austria, Belgium, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Lithuania, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. The main findings are:
While all European Member States should have transposed EU directives into national legislation to ensure equal opportunities and treatment for women and men in the fields of employment, working conditions and social security, severe gaps occur between the declaration of policies and their implementation in the research sector specifically. This is confirmed by the fact that progress towards representative equality has been slow, with notable exceptions such as in some of the Western European and the Nordic countries.
The scope and the regulatory density of gender equality legislation differ to a great extent in the European member states. Due to the EU gender equality and anti-discrimination framework, basic provisions on gender equality, equal treatment/opportunity and anti-discrimination are in force. Apart from this, the main focus lies on the gender balance in decision-making and the reconciliation of work and family.
Concerning higher education legislation, there is a great gap between those countries without any gender specific regulations and those countries which have a wide range of provisions on gender balance, gender in education and research, gender equality plans, gender officers, gender budgeting etc.
Gender mainstreaming is the leading strategy adopted by the EU Institutions and most of the Member States for achieving gender equality in all areas of policy-making, including the research, higher education and innovation sector. Despite official commitment to mainstreaming gender, instituting a (national) infrastructure for realizing equality between women and men is still a strategic objective in many national systems, thus not (fully) in place.
The policy approach of mainstreaming gender has led some countries to disperse responsibilities for gender equality without necessarily providing for adequate diffusion of gender expertise.
National actors make use of hierarchical, procedural and evaluative steering instruments as well as combinations of those three types of policy steering for enhancing the effectiveness of policies.
According to the data gathered, in all countries, regardless of the type of cooperation between funding agencies and governmental actors, funding agencies do not operate actively in the field of gender and science without governmental actors being active in the country too. However, in some countries, interventions in the field of gender and science in the research system are promoted solely by governmental actors without the active involvement of research funding agencies or other stakeholders.
Governmental actors mostly hold mandates for monitoring and coordinating equality measures, as well as in implementing instruments in gender equality on the national level.
Depending on the political structures of the different countries in general terms, and sometimes specifically to the higher education sector, individual actors in gender and science operate nationally, regionally or locally. Regional governmental actors operate in the Nordic region under the framework of Nordic Council of Ministers, coordinating, among other policy fields, the research collaboration as well as gender equality policy collaboration of the five Nordic countries and related autonomous areas.
All in all, the cross-country disparities between EU and associated countries regarding both the number of gender studies programs and gender research centers, and the proportion of women in grade A positions draw a paradox picture: whereas the She Figures statistics show that women’s representation in grade A positions is highest among Central and Eastern European countries such as Romania and Latvia, and lowest among Western and to some extent Southern European countries, e.g. Belgium or the Netherlands; when it comes to the potential of gender expertise by country, indicated by the number of gender studies programs and gender research centers, we see a rather different picture. The numbers of gender studies programs and gender research centers is relatively high in Western and North European countries (and Greece from Southern Europe as an exception), thus the data indicate the likelihood of there being a relatively high degree of gender knowledge and gender competence to consider gender aspects in research as well as in policy making. On the other hand, a high proportion of women in grade A positions does not necessarily mean there is a strong base for gender in research and thus good availability of gender competence.
Although the analysis of the 91 instruments shows that the ‘fixing the institutions’-approach has been implemented in many EU countries (15 of 21), the overwhelming amount of career advancement measures that exclusively address women suggests that the ‘fixing the women’-approach still persists. Although instruments focusing upon women’s recruitment, retention and career progression are still very prominent among most countries (16), strategies for structural change are very common, too.
Numerous transformative approaches in the policy instruments we found combine strategies for structural change with career advancement actions, for example, but target and provide incentives for organizations. This reveals that (women’s) inclusion or affirmative actions can certainly be part of a transformative approach implemented at the institutional level. Interestingly, in some countries very different measures with different approaches exist simultaneously, which include different targets, differently addressed genders and different types of practices. In these cases, a complex approach becomes visible and measures to advance, for example, are complemented – to different extents - by institutional and cultural changes and vice versa.
The report is available under the following address:
http://www.genderportal.eu/sites/default/files/resource_pool/GenPORT_analysis%20of%20policy%20environments%20report_0.pdf
Result 7: Policy briefs
The GenPORT Consortium has produced 26 Policy Briefs, which target national-level policy makers and institutional science leaders in research performing organizations (RPOs) and in research funding organizations (RFOs). All policy briefs have been updated twice, incorporating the results of corresponding online e-discussions, and evolving policy landscape.
The latest version of the policy briefs are available online under the following URL: http://www.genderportal.eu/blog/genport-policy-briefs-now-online
Twenty of the policy briefs are grouped around five themes: Recruitment and Promotion, Gender Equality Plans, Gender Dimension in Research Content (RPOs), Gender Dimension in Research Content (RFOs) and Gender Balance in Decision-Making. They are targeted at different country groups according to levels of implementation as reported by research organizations and the presence or absence of measures at the national level.
The other six policy briefs focus on: Tackling Sexual Harassment, Intersectionality, Securing Top-level Support for Gender Equality, Building Gender Competence and Knowledge, Statistics and Methodology, and How to Achieve Successful Implementation and Combat Resistance. These thematic briefs are not targeted at specific country groups because the topics address issues of general concern.
In the EU policy landscape, the European Research Area (ERA) is at the heart of Europe 2020 strategy and its Innovation Union (IU) policy flagship. One of the five ERA priorities is gender equality and gender mainstreaming in research. The 2012 ERA Communication invites Member states to create a legal and policy environment conducive to gender equality and mainstreaming through: (a) removing barriers including legal barriers to the recruitment, retention and career progression of female researchers, (b) addressing gender imbalances in decision making processes, (c) strengthening the gender dimension in research programs.
It also invites member states to foster partnerships with research funders, research organizations and universities in order to push for institutional and cultural change on gender through charters, performance agreements and awards whilst ensuring that at least 40% of the under-represented sex should participate in committees.
Stakeholder organizations in research are invited to carry out “institutional change relating to HR management, funding, decision- making and research programs through Gender Equality Plans which aim to (a) conduct impact assessment / audits of procedures and practices to identify gender bias, (b) implement innovative strategies to correct any bias, (c) set targets and monitor progress via indicators”.
The European Commission has conducted two surveys (2012/3 and 2014) to measure the level of progress made by research organizations in the EU in implementing the policy priorities of the ERA. The ERA surveys include questions that explore the actions taken by research organizations to promote gender equality.
The twenty policy briefs of GenPORT are structured according to the classification of countries according to the ERA facts and figures 2014 report. Two variables define the clusters. The first regards self- reported levels of implementation (RPOs and RFOs) per country compared to the EU average - for example the percentage of RPOs that are implementing any recruitment and promotion policies for female researchers in a given country- compared to the EU average. The second variable concerns the presence (or not) of national level policy measures in this field according to the European Commission. On this basis five groups of countries- could be discerned: (1) Implementation above EU average, measures identified; (2) Implementation above EU average; (3) Implementation below EU average, measures identified; (4) Implementation below EU average, (5) No implementation.
For each of the policy areas: Recruitment and Promotion Measures; Adoption of Gender Equality Plans in RPOs; Gender Dimension in Research Content (RPOs); Gender Dimension in Research Content (RFOs); Gender-Balance in Decision-Making – four country groups have been identified. In all policy areas (except Gender Dimension in Research Content [RFOs]) policy briefs are targeted at those four country groups with implementation above/ below EU average with/ without policy measures. In the case of Gender Dimension in Research Content (RFOs) - we have included the group of countries identified as having 'no implementation'- whilst 'frequent support above EU average' – is absent - as no country forms part of this group.
The policy briefs are structured on the basis of the findings obtained from an ERA survey. The limitations of the survey include that it was a self-assessment so - the implementation figures are based on those organizations. that reported they were implementing some gender equality measures. It only concerns those RPOs who answered the ERA survey (they employ 515.000 researchers - around 20% of total EU researchers). The sample for the ERA Survey was not randomly selected and the results have not been weighted due to a lack of substantiated information about the sample frame and the whole population of RPOs. This means producing inferential statistics about the wider population is not possible.
Despite these limitations, structuring the policy briefs along these lines meant that we were able to cover a range of progress levels, from ‘proactive’ countries to ‘inactive’ countries.
Analysis shows that gender equality policies in public research and policy developments over the last five years have resulted in a widening gap between proactive and relatively inactive countries (France is the only country which has clearly improved its position from relatively inactive to proactive). There is a real need for policy briefs targeted specifically at the group of countries characterized as ‘inactive’ – in an attempt to reduce this policy gap.
The GenPORT policy briefs provide examples of legislation, policies, initiatives and measures that can be taken at both the national and institutional levels. These policy briefs are designed to be read by national level policy makers and institutional science leaders and have been updated twice during the course of the project to take the findings of new research into account.
Result 8: Research Synthesis
The GenPORT consortium has produced 6 Research Synthesis spanning the following topics: (1) Education and Training, (2) Academic and Science Careers, (3) Institutional Practices and Processes, (4) Gender in Research Content and Knowledge Production, (5) Policy Setting and Implementation and (6) Historical Perspectives and Future Scenarios. The purpose of these documents is to provide an overview of the current debates in these areas and highlight the relevant bibliographic references, as well as provide links to further reading.
For the final update of the Research Synthesis, partners requested comments from colleagues outside of Europe on their Research Synthesis. This helped disseminate GenPORT and the Research Syntheses in and outside of Europe. Contributions from invited experts were either integrated into the research synthesis (RS1, RS5, RS6) or developed as blog posts (RS2, RS3). For the Gender in Research Content and Knowledge Production Research Synthesis it was more pertinent to circulate the findings to the chairs and rapporteurs of the Expert Advisory Groups on each H2020 societal challenge, to the Cabinet of Commissioner Moedas, the European Parliament’s FEMM and STOA Committees, and to key EU experts and advisers, such as Hans Borchgrevink who are involved in policy decisions on EURAXESS and Marie Sklodowska Curie Actions.
The Research Synthesis are available under the following links on GenPORT:
Education and Training (RS1):
http://www.genderportal.eu/resources/education-and-training-genport-research-synthesis-1
Academic and Science Careers (RS2):
http://www.genderportal.eu/resources/academic-and-science-careers-genport-research-synthesis-2
Institutional Practices and Processes (RS3)
http://www.genderportal.eu/resources/institutional-practices-and-processes-genport-research-synthesis-3
Gender in Research Content and Knowledge Production (RS4)
http://www.genderportal.eu/resources/gender-research-content-and-knowledge-production-genport-research-synthesis-4
Policy Setting and Implementation (RS5)
http://www.genderportal.eu/resources/policy-setting-and-implementation-genport-research-synthesis-5
Histories and Future Perspectives (RS6)
http://www.genderportal.eu/resources/historical-perspectives-and-future-scenarios-genport-research-synthesis-6
Result 9: Expert to Expert Directory
The GenPORT project involved four Concertation Meetings designed to enable sharing of experiences, knowledge, and feedback on the development of the portal. The 2nd Concertation Meeting has been organized (November 2015) in order to drive forward the creation of an Expert-to-Expert directory on GenPORT to create visibility of gender experts across the different scientific disciplines, which was needed to help deliver the gender equality objectives of Horizon 2020.
Upon registration, new users can indicate if they want to join the Expert Directory. Specific input fields are provided for interested users to document their expertise in their respective areas – these input fields were derived from the consultations enabled by the 2nd Concertation Meeting.
Interested third parties can easily scan for experts in their respective scientific disciplines.
The listing is available under the following URL: http://www.genderportal.eu/people
Result 10: E-Discussions
During the course of the project, the Consortium has utilized the portal to organize seven e-discussions. Domain experts were invited to contribute and lead the e-discussions, facilitated in each case by Consortium partners. The result of these discussions can be consulted online under the following links:
Discussion 1: Familienfreudnlichkeit and Vereinbarkeit in der Wissenschaft (http://www.genderportal.eu/group/online-diskussion-familienfreundlichkeit-und-vereinbarkeit-der-wissenschaft)
Discussion 2: Incorporating a Gender Perspective into H2020 Proposals (http://www.genderportal.eu/group/incorporating-gender-perspective-h2020-research-proposals)
Discussion 3: Gender Dimension in Research Content and Process – Research Funding Organization (http://www.genderportal.eu/group/gender-dimension-research-content-and-process-research-funding-organisations-perspectives)
Discussion 4: The Implementation of Gender Equality Plans (http://www.genderportal.eu/group/e-discussion-implementation-gender-equality-plans)
Discussion 5: Recruitment and Promotion of Women Researchers (http://www.genderportal.eu/group/e-discussion-recruitment-and-promotion-women-researchers)
Discussion 6: Gender Dimension in Research Content and Process – Research Performing Organization (http://www.genderportal.eu/group/gender-dimension-research-content-organisations)
Discussion 7: Gender Balance in Decision Making (http://www.genderportal.eu/group/e-discussion-gender-balance-decision-making-research-organisations)
Result 11: Gender & Science Blog
In order to promote the portal as a tool for holding contemporary discussions regarding gender and science, as well as facilitating entry points to the vast amount of different resources on the portal, the Consortium has created a Blog section on the portal. At the time of writing this report there are more than 115 blog posts available, many of them pertaining to dedicated topics such as
(1) Recommended Resources (http://www.genderportal.eu/blog-categories/recommended-resources) where Consortium member present a selection of high-quality resources on certain topics such as Anti-Gender Bias Training, Raising awareness or policy analysis and evaluation among others.
(2) Video interviews. The project has also produced a series of video interviews with selected experts of the gender and science community in Europe and beyond. These video interviews are available under the following URL: http://www.genderportal.eu/blog-categories/video-interviews Different topics are addressed such as the gender productivity gap in science, the gender dimension in physics, gender sensitive environmental monitoring, or the gender dimension in epidemiology among many others. Overall, more than 26 video interviews are available through the blog or the Vimeo Channel of the project https://vimeo.com/user45930980
(3) Female role models. Through a collaboration with artist Jennifer Mondfrans, several blog entries introduced the live of famous women scientists, including Irene Curie, Henrietta Swan Leavitt, or Rosalind Franklin among others. The dedicated blog entries are available under the following URL http://www.genderportal.eu/blog-categories/artist-residence
Result 12: Community engagement and portal sustainability
The community that the GenPORT portal is designed to serve is very broad, international, and cross-sectorial, a fact that was apparent during the launch-event of the portal.. The launch event was organized in two parts. The first part targeted Europe’s policy makers, since gender equality is one of the core values of the European Union, and took place at the European Parliament. It was organized in collaboration with the STOA Committee. The second part targeted the broad science community and was designed to demonstrate the value of having the portal as an access point to normally widely scattered resources and as a reporting place for organizations and project that develop or apply measures to advance gender equality. A sustainability plan was developed which perceives four types of users: Strategic Partners who can ensure financial sustainability; Sustainability Partners who can ensure quality of the content; Contributors of resources, who ensure that new content is continuously added, and Community User who will be utilizing the portal. Clearly, these four categories are not exclusive. Argumentation table was developed with the reasons for and the benefits of being involved in GenPORT in one of these roles, which provides information for marketing the portal. Information was collected on target organizations in each category for marketing GenPORT. A marketing flier was designed to support the marketing activities. A list of ‘business’ options were identified that could be the source of income to cover costs of maintaining and further developing and expanding the portal.
The Consortium explored different legal formats that would enable GenPORT to operate after the project ends. The new entity will operate as a not-for-profit organization but with some services that will have the capacity to produce income, for example:
1. Create a range of specially designed products and services that the community needs and are able to pay for, e.g. responding to a request from Horizon 2020 consortium for a synthesis review of scientific literature on the topic of their proposal
2. Tap into suitable sources of project-type grant/sponsorship funding opportunities, e.g. science communication grants from the Robert Bosch Foundation, Wellcome Trust, Elsevier Foundation
3. Engage in collaborative partnerships with major stakeholders who have a gender mainstreaming policy agenda and a budget to achieve it which may allow ‘sponsorship’ type relationship with GenPORT, e.g. Science Europe, NordForsk, L’Oreal
4. Crowd-source, i.e. appealing for contribution to the GenPORT community of users
5. Membership fees structured around level of access to GenPORT resources, e.g. ‘free’ when accessing resources contributed freely by the community, but ‘charged’ if the platform is used for particular tasks, for example an organization or a project may wish to use it to conduct a survey, a focus group meetings etc.
Create an expert ‘market place’ to enable users obtain fee-based expert support for specific problems, e.g. a consortium preparing H2020 proposal may wish to engage an expert to help formulate a plan to integrate gender dimension into the project’s work plan.
For the immediate future, the portal will be sustained by the coordinating institution UOC for a limited period of time in order to facilitate the transition to a self-sustaining format.
Potential Impact:
The GenPORT portal provides a gateway to gender and science resources, which otherwise may be hard to find as they are dispersed across many Internet sites, journals, books etc. Therefore, the first impact is on building awareness and accessibility to knowledge in gender issues in science.
The portal is first and foremost community sourced, and will be maintained with the help of the community. Therefore, the second impact is that it acts as a cross-sectoral community builder and facilitator and supporter of emerging community of practice.
As Illustration 1 demonstrates, there has been a constant growth in terms of users registered on the portal as well as resources uploaded and shared. At the end of the project, the portal counts +1100 resources, +500 users, +260 organizations and +180 events. Taking Google Analytics as a further success indicator, the portal has received since the start of the analytics service (22.7.2014) a total of 176,516 page views or 43,532 users. The average pageviews per month is about +5000.
Most importantly, the project has established itself as a prime communication channel on Twitter with more than 1000 followers. In comparison with other Gender and Science related Twitter accounts (see Illustration 2), GenPORT comes in fourth after the L'Oreal initiative, the American Women in Science Association and the Gender Summit. This establishes the portal and its Twitter account as a primary dissemination channel for the gender and science community. In contrast to other accounts, this dissemination channel is available to the community as such: any registered user of the portal can disseminate their resources and events through the GenPORT Twitter account.
As these numbers indicate, GenPORT provides a central communication channel for disseminating existing projects results and outcomes. Therefore the third impact is on facilitating more effective dissemination of new research, and increasing the visibility, accessibility and usability of existing resources.
The portal uses a systematic methods for organizing and accessing resources. Therefore the fourth impact is in advancing coordinated access to high-quality research, policy and practical resources developed through extensive consultation process.
The portal technical aspects combine several innovative techniques. Therefore the fifth impact is on advancing European digital capacity to promote international research on gender, science, technology and innovation.
Impact achieved beyond the project and Consortium partners
Overall, the project achieved a high level of visibility through the organization of 4 Concertation Meetings and participation in key events in the gender and science community organized by others such as the Gender Summits. Especially in conjunction with the Gender Summit, GenPORT has reached audiences well beyond Europe, when Gender Summit took place in Mexico, South Korea and Japan.
A key event certainly was the official launch of the portal, which took place at the European Parliament during a working breakfast hosted by the Science and Technology Options Assessment (STOA) Panel, and attended by MEPs representing the Women's Rights and Gender Equality (FEMM) committees, on the 21st April 2016 in Brussels. STOA’s mission includes providing Parliament’s Committees and other parliamentary bodies concerned with independent, high-quality and scientifically impartial studies and information for the assessment of the impact of possibly introducing or promoting new technologies and identifying, from the technological point of view, the options for the best courses of action to take. The breakfast was hosted by Terry Reintke MEP (FEMM Committee member) and Eva Kaili MEP (STOA First Vice-Chair) and chaired by Mairead McGuinness, EP Vice-President responsible for STOA who gave insightful introductions and reflections as to how GenPORT could support their work. 64 participants, many from within the Parliament joined the 5 MEPs chairing the breakfast meeting. Registration was closed early as capacity was reached within a week of opening.
An important impact not anticipated at the beginning of the project concerns the development of the Gender & Science Taxonomy. The taxonomy is a key instrument in order to provide structured access to gender and science resources on the portal. Its importance lies in the fact that it provides an overview of the current topics that are associated with gender and science and hence provides an important knowledge base about this field itself. Others can draw upon this knowledge to structure related fields of expertise and create visibility of experiences and knowledge related to gender.
In fact, the project has been contacted by software development project from Cornell University (USA) in order to use the taxonomy in a project related to agriculture and gender. However, the importance of the Gender and Science Taxonomy also lies in the fact that it provides the basis for cooperation with other resources providers working in gender and science. The European Institute of Gender Equality thus is using the G&S Taxonomy provided by GenPORT in order to interlink key terms of its Glossary. This allows in the future not only to explore resources classified under certain terms on both sites, but also has the potential to automatically exchange meta-data of resources – which means, that users can access content across sites easily.
The importance of the Gender & Science Taxonomy has also been emphasized during the 4th Concertation Meeting, where gender experts, policy makers and library experts agreed on the need for a shared taxonomy to further develop the inter-linkage of resource and information provides across Europe. Especially the need for a translation of taxonomies was underlined and should be continued in the future.
Regarding the wider societal impact, GenPORT has managed to gather 23 Portal Ambassadors (http://www.genderportal.eu/ambassadors). These ambassadors come from different scientific disciplines and represent different world regions and actively support the platform, advocating for its use in their respective networks and activities. The dissemination effect of the portal ambassadors is considerable given the fact that the invited experts are high profile individuals not only in their respective scientific areas but also to the wider public.
Furthermore, GenPORT has helped to establish e-discussions as a viable format for organizing exchanges between experts and the wider public around the globe. Overall 7 e-discussions were organized (see previous section). The feedback from participants were overall positively surprised. Participants described the format as interesting and well suited to discuss contemporary issues on gender and science relatively rapidly and “cheaply”. Other than disseminating knowledge in the form of reports and other digital documents, online discussions provide a more lively and direct manner to exchange experiences and generate an online reference to the topics discussed. The e-discussions have been a primary channel for addressing the third objective of the portal, namely to promote exchange of experiences and collaboration between communities of practitioners.
List of Websites:
http://www.genderportal.eu