Final Report Summary - GENDERTIME (Transfering Implementing Monitoring Equality)
Executive Summary:
1.1. Executive summary
The aim of the GenderTIME project was to identify and implement the best systemic approach to increase the participation and career advancement of women researchers in seven selected institutions across Europe (Austria, France, Germany, Italy, Serbia, Spain and United Kingdom) where self-tailored action plans had to be implemented. The plans had to deal with recruitment, retention and promotion policies, supporting work-life balance measures, updated management and research standards, supporting policies for dual career-couples, etc. . A crucial point was the real commitment of the organizational heads of each participant and the choice of a transfer agent in each institution.
The work done : The consortium cooperated on common actions; it monitored the implementation process by producing tailor-made monitoring tools; it organised knowledge transfer in GenderTIME institutions and externally (sister-projects, other institutions, other scholars and stakeholders in academia and policy makers); it evaluated the cooperation and collaboration within the consortium and the impact of GenderTIME’s objectives; it measured change in the participating institutions through evaluation instruments such as tailor-made indicators; it disseminated the toolbox for implementing structural change in institutions interested in similar approaches.
As planned the work was organised in four different phases:
1-Launching phase between months 1 and 6: building of the web portals and e-collaboration tools, editing dissemination material, 1st Workshop about knowledge transfer, definition of actions plans in each institution, first workshop with “sister” projects.
2- Installing phase between months 7 and 24, focused on the implementation and monitoring of the action plans and knowledge exchange among partners (mid-term report on the implementation of Gender Action Plans).
3-Reflecting phase between months 25 and 36, the implementation went on, it produced a report on the implementation of Gender Action Plans and a toolbox for implementing structural change in the context of any given institution.
4-Spreading phase oriented towards institutions out of the consortium: final international conference with proceedings, final version of toolbox (guidelines in 6 languages).
Main results: - Institutional mapping of existing policies and practices resulting in a set of seven recommendations for gender equality plans design and implementation;
- Guidelines for monitoring and implementation of gender equality projects;
- Successfully implementation of transfer Agents;
- GenderTIME toolbox online in the public project Web site;
- System of indicators “UNIPD-GEI” for measuring gender equality in academic institutions
Summary of main dissemination activities:
- Presentation of the GenderTIME project at more than 70 conferences (papers, posters) in Europe, America, and South Africa; participation in 10 round tables/ panels; publication of 3 books and 10 books chapters .
-Organization of 11 networking events with other projects (EGERA, STAGES, FESTA, GENISLAB, INTEGER, GENOVATE, GARCIA, TRIGGER, GENERA).
General comment: the project went on smoothly, all the deadlines were respected and, at every step, the collective work of the consortium was efficient, productive and largely disseminated.
Project Context and Objectives:
1.2. Summary description of project context and objectives
The project context
The under-representation of women in certain scientific disciplines, as well as in research decision making positions in most fields is well known and has indeed been a major concern for the European Commission since a number of years. Reports issued by the European Commission for the last decade (ETAN Report 2000, ENWISE Report 2004, Gender and Excellence in the Making 2004, She Figures 2003, 2006, 2009, 2012, 2015, WIRDEM Report 2008, Benchmarking Policy Measures for Gender Equality in Science 2008) highlight the fact that in spite of a growing number of female students in higher education, and an increased presence of women among PhD students, horizontal and vertical segregation remain salient.
The leaky pipe metaphor (Angier 1995) has been coined to represent the progressive decrease in the presence of women in science and technology at growing levels of the formative and professional route (Contarello 2008; UPGEM Reports 2008). The underlying causes of this phenomenon have been extensively studied all over the EU countries and the general conclusion is that contemporary science in European countries rewards, through various mechanisms, the male gender (Badaloni 2008). Policies for recruitment, retention, promotion and leadership of researchers in European research bodies often affect career progress of female researchers adversely. Moreover, when it comes to appointing skilled professionals to decision-making positions in national research and academic institutions, women are already at a disadvantage because of their smaller numbers, preventing them from participating more equitably in the highest echelons of science. Even in the fields where female graduates and doctoral students are more numerous (as social sciences, humanities, biology, etc.) we observe an under- representation of women in research decision-making positions, less opportunities to reach full professorship. Pre-conditions and causes of the “brain-drain” or “glass ceiling” are multifaceted and complex in each of the EU Member States.
To actively involve more research and higher education institutions, it is important to consider the processes of transformation which universities and research institutions have undergone during the past decades, and which have challenged their existing structures and modes of organisation (Kogan 1994). In EU-28 European countries, the transformations that underlay current challenges to academic and research institutions include the Bologna Process, the internationalisation of the academic and research landscape, an increasing number of students and a demand to provide more vocational training, when universities and research organisations are competing for limited financial and personal resources, facing issues of brain drain, but also new needs and expectations from early career and senior researchers.
The WIRDEM report released in April 2008 by the European Commission examined nomination procedures, cultural barriers and funding limitations hindering the progress of women in their academic careers, reviewed member states policies and existing procedures for evaluating and promoting researchers to senior positions, identified examples of good practice at national and institutional levels, and proposed recommendations for better targeted actions at the European level.
European and national systems of recruitment, retention and appraisal of scientific achievements are not gender neutral (Wenerås and Wold 1997, Olson 2002, Wächter 2010) and thus the percentage of female professors seldom exceeds 20%, and is even much lower in key fields of innovation and technological development. European science and research bodies cannot afford to exclude potential innovators. Thus, the role of women scientists has to be recognised by European research bodies as of crucial importance for the potential of innovation to European R&T development.
Glover (2002) argues on the base of European statistical data, that there are three different kinds of gender segregation:
1. vertical segregation (drawing pin model of the distribution of females: the higher in the hierarchy, the lower the number of females, also referred to as “glass ceiling“)
2. horizontal segregation (increased number of women in certain disciplines and professions with lower pay and careers options)
3. contract segregation (women more often have short term contracts and find themselves in an insecure employment status ).
Glover has also demonstrated that regarding persistence, women who stay in scientific employment have a more short-term and discontinuous attachment to the scientific labour market than men. Female scientists are also are more likely to exit at an early stage of their careers or move into part-time work when they become mothers (cf. http://www.scenta.co.uk/uploads/athena/athena/report17.pdf).
The Global Gender Gap Report 2010 published by the World Economic Forum (WEF) highlights several areas specifically important for the interconnection of gender equality, productivity, growth and development. These are girl’s education, women’s labour force participation, women as consumer, women and spending decisions, women and leadership (The Global Gender Gap Report 2010: 30f). The report states that a nation’s competitiveness highly depends on how the women are educated and if the nation takes their talent into account. In order to maximize its competitiveness and developmental potential each country has to reach gender equality. The European Commission has stressed again in its recent communication paper to the European Parliament that innovation and competitiveness are central for the European 2020 strategy. The goal of becoming an ‘innovation Union’ can be reached for example through investing in research and development, by attracting and train young people to become researchers and at the same time offer internationally competitive research careers within Europe. Therefore each member state is encouraged to train enough researchers in order to fulfil the national research and development plans, also including the promotion of attractive employment conditions by taking into account gender and dual career models (Europe 2020 Flagship Initiative Innovation Union 2010: 8f). This also includes the idea that a more diverse research population might also lead to more innovation within the research and development area of each member state and this highly supports the encouragement of becoming an innovation union in general.
Again the Global Gender Gap report stating that the women’s economic participation in countries where women are as educated and healthy as men is still not striking. The authors demonstrate that business leaders and decision makers have to ensure to remove barriers of women’s entries into the work force
and need to support practices and policies “that will provide equal opportunities for rising to leadership within companies” (The Global Gender Gap Report 2011, p. 8).
Consortium countries 2011 rank 2011 score 2010 rank 2010 score 2009 rank 2009 score
Austria 34 0.7165 37 0.7091 42 0.7031
France 48 0.7018 46 0.7025 18 0.7331
Germany 11 0.7590 13 0.7530 12 0.7449
Italy 74 0.6796 74 0.6765 72 0.6798
Serbia - - - - - -
Spain 12 0.7580 11 0.7554 17 0.7345
Sweden 4 0.8044 4 0.8024 4 0.8139
United Kingdom 16 0.7462 15 0.7460 15 0.7402
This chart demonstrates a great variety between the current gender gap score of the participating countries (ranging from the lowest of 0.6765 in Italy to the highest of 0.8024 score in Sweden). One can tell from the Global Gender Gap Report in general that the Nordic countries have not fully reached gender equality yet but have closed the gender gap more successfully (Iceland, Norway, Finland, Sweden) individually reaching more than 80%. These countries have performed best so far in distributing available incomes, resources and opportunities between women and men. At the tertiary education level -- which is of interest for the GenderTIME project – the gender gap had been reversed and women are now in the majority of high skilled work force in the Nordic countries and in Sweden, Norway and Iceland more than 1.5 women for every man are taking up tertiary education (The Global Gender Gap Report 2010: 20f).
Notwithstanding the differences between national and regional contexts with regard to specific challenges and transformations, in all European countries, these changes have fostered the development of new structures of organisation and modes of governance of academic and research institutions. To varying degrees, new legislations for higher education and research have been adopted, introducing more autonomy and increased competition among academic and research institutions, with quality standards in teaching, research and management, etc. and certification procedures introduced as requirements for public support and recognition.
With regard to the issue of gender equality, the question is whether and to what degree the different European countries have integrated a gender mainstreaming approach, positive action schemes or e- quality insurance policy when implementing these policies in academic and research institutions, and how they have been translated into concrete measures.
Gender research and debate has provided a major contribution to the critical assessment of the prevalent structures and modes of governance in academic and research institutions and pointed out the gendered academic culture, career patterns and notions of excellence (Leemann, 2002; EMBO Reports 2007; CNRS/Mission pour la place des femmes, 2005; UPGEM 2008). This critical assessment has led feminist scholars to advocate the implementation of measures such as coaching programmes and mentoring schemes to support women’s access to academic careers. Today, research on management and staff development in academic and research institutions acknowledges the potential of such measures to foster institutional change, as results indicate that in institutions such as universities and research institutions, institutional change is achieved through the change of professional praxis and identity of actors themselves (Pellert, 1999, 2002).
The importance of the gender dimension to address questions such as leadership, staff development and governance in higher education and research institutions is also highlighted by research on leadership requirements (Bagilhole 2008) and by research on the impact of organisational structures and flows of communication to explain differences in research productivity between women and men (Whittington 2007).
Today, in many European countries, research and higher education institutions have made first steps to implement effective gender mainstreaming, integrating the gender issue in management processes, but also in staff and leadership development programmes and assessment procedures. Institutions have also started to integrate the gender dimension in quality assurance procedures to assess productivity and governance of academic and research institutions. However, important efforts are needed to foster the recognition of the fundamental importance of the gender dimension and of gender equality measures to develop adequate responses to challenges faced by academic and research institutions in Europe.
This need for institutional change within research bodies, and particularly within universities, has also been recognised outside Europe, most visibly in North America where it has been a central point of recent U.S. and Canadian initiatives. Programs such as the National Science Foundation’s pioneer ADVANCE program, have since 2001 successfully involved major universities into changing their policies and procedures for recruitment, retention, tenure and promotion, to improve the situation of women faculty, and have developed best practices as well as effective networking and dissemination approaches (ADVANCE).
Commitment of university leaders and top R&D decision and policy makers, is also a key feature of a recent report and call to action released by the U.S. National Academies in September 2006, entitled “Beyond Bias and Barriers: Fulfilling the Potential of Women in Academic Science and Engineering” (National Academies, 2007), which highlights a number of effective practices developed by U.S including those developed by ADVANCE-funded universities. This report has already led to significant initiatives being implemented by universities, federal funding agencies, professional societies and even U.S. Congress. Shortly before, the InterAcademy Council, which in June 2006 released an advisory report, had expressed a similar call to action and a set of practical recommendations more specifically aimed at national Science Academies (IAC, 2006) .
Such efforts offer useful examples of successful practices aimed both at increasing the numbers of women in research and enhancing their participation in decision-making positions, and complement European analyses and efforts. A fact the European Commission has fully recognised through recent call for proposals. The PRAGES project (Practising Gender Equality in Science), currently funded by FP7 Area 5.2.1.1. specifically aims at comparing the various strategies implemented in North America, Australia, and Europe for promoting the presence of women in decision-making bodies relating to scientific research in public institutions, and will be examined by our consortium.
Such analyses also help to highlight the impact of the European debate on gender equality and the measures that have been developed to foster women’s careers in higher education and research to develop responses to current challenges of academic and research institutions.
The objectives
GenderTIME’s general objective is to contribute to an organizational and structural change in European research and to disseminate at all levels the tools to implement it through the following specific objectives:
1. to identify among the participating institutions the best systemic approaches to increase the participation and career advancement of women researchers, at organisational level in each institution, at social and cultural level with actions aimed at changing the gender climate; at European level, through increasing cooperation between universities and research labs;
2. to define and implement realistic and effective self-tailored Actions Plans taking advantage of knowledge transfer between new-comers and experienced institutions across Europe;
3. to monitor and evaluate action plans through self-tailored monitoring tools;
4. to facilitate the transfer and exchange of experiences between partners through a mutual learning process and knowledge transfer workshops at different levels and exchanges of personnel;
5. to multiply the transfer and the exchange of experiences between the consortium and other EU higher education and research institutions in order to ensure a maximum impact of the project.
6. to produce a toolbox and monitoring tools to implement gender policies and structural change;
7. to disseminate the guidelines and monitoring tools.
Project Results:
1.3 Description of the main results
There are two kinds of results of the project GenderTIME.
- results obtained by Work Packages
- results obtained by partners implementing a Gender Equality Plan
1. 3. 1. Results obtained by Work Packages.
Each Work Package defined objectives, tasks and deliverables to achieve during the 48 months of the project.
WP2 Implementation process management
Objectives and Tasks
WP2 focused upon the development and implementation of tailor-made action plans at partner institutions. WP2 tasks allowed partner institutions to work independently within a common conceptual framework to devise specific measures to improve gender equity. Activities to support action plan implementation knowledge sharing between partners were also part of this WP.
Over the course of the project the following activities have been carried out:
During the first reporting period (M1-M18), in relation to Task 1, the state of the art of existing measures began by devising a template for partners to complete, to enable comparisons of information on existing policies and practices in each institution. The template asked partners to provide information on the national and institutional context; information on existing measures including information on the origin, implementation, limitations, actor, target group, finance, and evaluations conducted. The collection, comparison and analysis of the results are available in Deliverable 2.1. This task was led by the LoU team.
Whilst also investigating existing measures partners were asked to update their action plans in light of the information gathered – for example, if any particular gaps were identified these should be remedied in the action plans themselves if possible. Once the action plans were revised and reported on in Deliverable 2.1 each partner had responsibility to implement actions in their own institutional context over the course of the project. Updates and analysis of the action plans were collected in D2.2 in month eighteen. This task was led by the UPEC team.
A third focus in this period was to ensure the proper implementation of action plans through the development of facilitative tools. During the meeting in Wuppertal in December 2013 an internal workshop was held to allow partners to work together on action plan implementation through a discussion of successes and challenges. Following on from the workshop partners were asked to work more closely together in pairs to offer mutual support and guidance on self-defined aspects of the implementation process. This task was led by the Tecnalia team.
During the second reporting period (M19-M36) task leaders have facilitated the systematic collection of data on action plan implementation in partner institutions. Second, task leaders have made comparisons between the data collected and also coordinated with WP3 (Monitoring), WP4 (transfer) and WP6 (toolbox) the intersecting data and results among WPs.
WP2 is a continuous reflection of the implementation progress and feed directly into the work outlined in WP3 that monitors the progress of the measures established in WP2. During this month’s WP2 leaders collaborated with WP3 leaders on the data collection which attempted to enable streamlining of data collection across the consortium. Through the combination and close cooperation of WP2 and WP3 (Monitoring) first steps on a better reflection on the impact of gender equity measures and identification of structural factors that hinder gender equality at institutional level have been started.
The tailor made action plans sketched out at the beginning of the project have been further developed in these months and the action implementation followed up and reported by the Gender Time partners under support of their institutional transfer agents. For that purpose partner information has been collected in autumn 2014 and spring 2015 (feedback reports) on the occasion of project Consortium meetings in Bilbao (December 2014), Graz (June 2015) and Loughborough (December 2015). Once the action plans were revised and reported on in Deliverable 2.1 each partner had responsibility to implement actions in their own institutional context. Updates and analysis of the action plans were collected in D2.2 in month eighteen and further analysis was reported in D2.3.
The third WP2 activity in this period focused on supporting partners to work together on action plan implementation through a discussion of successes and challenges, obtaining guidance on self-defined aspects of the implementation process.
The enabling of knowledge transfer and collaboration between partners was initiated to support partners in action plan implementation and the difficulties that arise in such an endeavour. For that purpose several workshops were conducted. In these sessions’ key areas for knowledge transfer were highlighted and reported previously in D2.1 and D2.2. In this period a collective and guided reflection about the partners’ experiences when implementing the Gender action plans have also been conducted.
In the final reporting period (M37-M48), based on the definition and design of the project activities reported during the 1st and 2nd periodic report task leaders have facilitated the reflections on action plan implementation in partner institutions through collaborations with WP3 and WP4 and engagement in specific activities.
The main effort in this period has been done in maintaining cross-institutional relationships using frameworks for information sharing, alongside more informal networking time that is important to the maintenance of working relationships. The focus has been to offer information about possibilities for gender equality interventions, but also to stimulate reflective learning processes and knowledge sharing among the beneficiaries and the organizations involved.
All the partners presented their reflections about the implementation of measures in their institutions at the stakeholder workshop (WP4) held on the occasion of the Final Conference in Paris. The main conclusions were enclosed in each of the partners´ institutions Gender Time Action Plan Posters. More information can be found at: http://www.gendertime.org/GEP_implementation
WP2 leaders collected the main conclusions of the work done under WP2 in a paper that was presented at the project Final Conference: “Using communities of practice to support the implementation of gender equality plans: lessons from a cross-national action research project” (Barnard et al. 2016).
Main results
Institutional mapping of existing policies and practices
The eight institutions that took part in the mapping exercise outlined information about a total of 149 existing gender equality measures - an average of 19 measures per institution. The top three broad topics that these measure address are on ‘Institutional culture’, ‘Management and policy making’ and ‘Work-life balance’. This was encouraging for us at the start of our GEP implementation as it demonstrated that there were policies in place to address equality in the workplace around the key issues of the organisational culture, the ways management have mainstreamed gender equality and policy around the issue and the balancing work with private/family life, all of which have been raised in research as crucial for women in employment.
The mapping found that the three areas that have the least amount of measures are in relation to ‘salaries’, ‘recruitment’ and ‘staff development and support’.
An analysis of the levels of implementation of existing measures already in place found that 60 per cent of the measures listed had been fully implemented; 28 per cent had been partially implemented and a small proportion (7%) had not been implemented at all - some of the measures that had not been implemented had imminent plans for action. There were variances across partners with regards to the levels of implementation of existing measures – some institutions had fully implemented all measures, whilst others have lower levels of implementation, which suggests differences in organisational cultures with regards to gender equality policy and practice. The mapping clearly points to the impact of the organisational context on the ways gender equality measures are positioned in the institution.
Information about the measures was broadly categorised by topic: Careers development and networking; Institutional Culture; Management and policy making; Recruitment; Salaries; Staff development and support; and Work-life balance. The ordering of measures according to these broad categories, though an imperfect categorisation enables greater clarity in providing an overview of institutional gender equality policy and practice. It also provides a framework for identifying gaps and measures that could be transferred between institutions and possibly making comparisons between institutions.
The analysis was not only about assessing the state of the art of gender equality policies and practices across the institutions, the mapping exercise also resulted in a set of concrete recommendations for GEP design and implementation:
o Recommendation 1. Institutions should conduct evaluations of existing measures.
o Recommendation 2. Institutions should consider investing in policies that have only been partially implemented so far.
o Recommendation 3. Institutions with relatively low levels of gender equality activities should focus on initiating new measures, learning from the successes of other institutions.
o Recommendation 4. Identify the gaps around particular objectives in your own institutional activities and use the knowledge and ideas from other institutions to devise new actions.
o Recommendation 5. Research teams should build positive relationships with the key actors where this has not already been established. Working to enable communication and action between key groups of the institution should be part of the GEP for all institutions.
o Recommendation 6. Secure the commitment of people in the organization who are involved in change processes: the sustainability of dedicated gender equality structures at institutional level is important.
o Recommendation 7. Create tools for enhancing knowledge sharing and develop formal and informal space for this to occur. Organise events that bring the community together and make the most of the experiences of participants foster and enhance knowledge transfer.
These recommendations proved a useful starting point, based on up to date empirical data collected in institutions, which underpinned the methodology developed for supporting GEP design and implementation
Supporting Gender Equality Plans design and implementation
Learning from each other through institutional pairings
The mapping exercise highlighted the different starting points of the institutions in the project. Some institutions were based in countries with a strong gender equality policy framework and an established culture in addressing organisational equality and diversity objectives: whereas other institutions were relatively new to this kind of work. The institutional pairing exercise took advantage of the differences between institutions and research teams’ strengths by promoting a closer relationship and providing a framework for collaborative knowledge sharing. In a workshop environment participants were asked to consider the challenges they would like to address; the institution(s) that may help me to address them; strengths/success practices that can help others; and which institutions might benefit from my strengths/successes. In response to the answers given, teams were then paired up and given a set of structured questions to work through: at the end of the session a plan was mutually agreed for information sharing and support focused on specific tasks in the GEP.
An example of this includes: one institution sharing information about the system for collecting gender disaggregated data to an institution where no such system exists; another offered expertise in conducting focus groups; another described in detail the homeworking policy in place, including information on how this is evaluated at institutional level and the experiences of staff who work this way. One pairing looked in detail at academic career models and how careers develop in the institutional context. Clearly this kind of knowledge sharing is simply good practice on such a project, however, the pairing-model allowed more in-depth knowledge exchange – so we could ask questions about ‘what really happens in your institution’, to go beyond the rhetoric of written policy documentation, or even that which might be shared in a formal meeting context.
Sharing challenges and successes through World Cafe workshops
Workshops gave the opportunity for community members to have open discussions, to work closely together, to reflect on experiences and to offer mutual support and guidance on the self-defined aspects of the implementation. The overall reflection on experiences helped the group to specify ‘how to overcome challenging’ factors and ‘how to use supporting’ factors for implementation of the actions (e.g. how to overcome challenges or how to best take advantage of the success factors). A key success factor identified in the workshops is the good timing of the project in relation to other institutional activities. The workshops provided a secure environment for research team members to articulate and discuss the challenges faced in GEP work.
This has allowed creation of an overview of activities where complementarities can be easily spotted and possible areas for further examination identified. In this sense, the areas that have most similarities across the institutions are in the analysis of the attrition of women in HE, flexible working policy implementation, instruments for the evaluation of gender policies, mentoring and skills enhancing programmes, gender as a crosscutting issue, how to involve decision makers, bureaucracy resistances and communication.
From this point, this research represents not only an opportunity to implement gender equality actions, but is also a starting point to install a culture of reflection at institutional level. Identified challenges require supportive actions dealing with disaggregated data at institutional level together with internal (at project level and institutional level) and external communication (large scale) creating gender culture. Furthermore, we found in the workshops that efforts are needed to create a common vocabulary across the different institutions (and nations), evaluation methods require specification and more actions are needed to consolidate the commitment from the decision making spheres. The ability to openly discuss challenges and successes in a confidential and supportive community positively impacted on the research teams as they attempt to tackle a complex organisational issue.
WP3 Monitoring
Introduction
The objectives of Work Package 3 in GenderTIME were: 1) to develop monitoring tools, and 2) to monitor the outcome of the GEAPs in each GenderTIME institutions. In total 12 monitoring tools were developed and used to collect information about the progress of the implementation of the GEAPs. The information about the progress was compared with the project plans and constituted a starting point for on-going reflections by the GenderTIME members and discussions about proposals for corrective actions in order to enhance efficiency and impact of the implementation process.
The three most significant results of Work Package 3 can be categorized as follows:
1) Systematic documentation of the implementation of GEAPs in the GenderTime institutions
2) Recommendations for efficient change agency in gender equality projects
3) Guidelines for efficient monitoring of gender equality projects
1) Systematic documentation of the implementation of GEAPs
The results of the monitoring activities illustrate how the GenderTIME project positively influenced the participating institutions in increasing gender equality. Some of the most noticeable changes involved: knowledge and awareness; behaviour; culture; policies; and structures and management. The achievements of Work Package 3, however, extend beyond these project-specific results, and also include results that are of a more abstract and general character. These results fill a gap in existing literature on gender equality change projects and are elaborated in more detail below.
Systematization of the implementation process
The collected information on achievements during the implementation was used to develop a new way of monitoring structural change processes and to shift focus from objectives to processes, i.e. what the teams actually were doing when trying to achieve these objectives. This process perspective simplified and systematized the complexity in the implementation process as it allowed for commonalities within a wide set of activities to appear. It also proved to be user-friendly, illustrative and comprehensive and facilitated a new and improved way of comparing achievements between institutions.
Systematization of challenges and success factors
The monitoring activities contributed to important knowledge on challenges and success factors in organizational change processes. The monitoring tools were constructed in order to identify resistance and challenges and problems along the way, as well as success stories, facilitators and supporting factors. The analysis of the information collected using the monitoring tools contributed to an increased understanding of which factors that motivate academics and practitioners to engage in activities aimed at transforming research institutions into gender equal organizations. The tools thus provided a personal and individual perspective on success factors and challenges, especially resistance. Important results were also the collected accounts on how challenges could be overcome and how resistance could be counteracted.
Systematization of individual and shared reflection
The monitoring tools gathered complex, diverse and detailed information about the progress of the implementation process focussing not only supporting and hindering factors but also detailed accounts of causes for gender inequalities, and how institutional differences influence the implementation process. Work Package 3 systematized the knowledge transfer and provided an arena where accounts and reflections were shared and discussed during workshops and meetings throughout the project.
2) Recommendations for efficient change agency
One of the main contributions of Work Package 3 concerns the production of new knowledge about monitoring methods and monitoring tools. The results illustrate how monitoring activities can contribute to efficient management of structural change projects that aim to improve gender equality within science and technology institutions. The most significant recommendations are listed below.
Recommendation 1: Build a “super team”!
The first recommendation is to build a “super team” of committed change agents. Being alone and perhaps also isolated in an organization is one of the most serious challenges for efficient change agency. The monitoring results point to how important a networking strategy is for change agents. In order to facilitate change it is necessary to build coalitions both within and outside the organization. Organizational leaders and managers are significant actors in change processes and gaining their commitment, involvement and support is essential. However, also collaborations with other organizational actors are recommended, such as administrators and other support staff. Gender equality researchers can be important allies since their expertise and knowledge can be invaluable in understanding e.g. challenges and resistance. But it is likewise important to use an interdisciplinary and inclusive approach and involve people from different fields of expertise. Bridging knowledge gaps through training and knowledge sharing is further suggested as important in order to be able to build these “super teams” and gain the necessary commitment. Finally, in order to guarantee sustainability of a change project succession planning within the “super team” is crucial.
Recommendation 2: Know the organisation and its problem!
The second recommendation emphasizes the importance of having a good knowledge of the organization and of the specific problems and issues at hand. One way of gaining this knowledge is through the above-mentioned “super team” and by involving people who can contribute with valuable information about the organization based on their experiences from different departments and their expertise within different fields. In order to gain this in-depth knowledge about the organization it is also necessary to allocate resources for activities concerning reviewing and assessing the organization. These activities should provide deep and thorough understanding of the existing state of affairs. The monitoring tools used in the GenderTIME project illustrate how this information successfully can be collected through surveys, interviews and focus groups, but also by utilizing already existing systems and procedures and forming coalitions with HR offices and other administrative offices. The monitoring results also highlight problems with lack of organizational transparency, rigid administrative routines and structural complexities. Change agents therefore need to be persistent when developing such coalitions but also understand necessary considerations concerning e.g. confidentiality issues when dealing with data and statistics.
Recommendation 3: Have realistic visions and flexible goals!
The third recommendation emphasizes the importance of using the facts and the data gathered about the status quo to formulate realistic visions about the change process and the goals. These goals should be of a more general and abstract character when the change process first commence, and can become more and more detailed and concrete as more information is gathered about the organization. Reflections about the goals, and discussions about the adjustment of goals, should therefore be allowed throughout the implementation process. The goals should be appropriate and achievable so that resources are used efficiently and not initially in areas where the resistance will be the greatest. Instead, short-term goals can result in short-term wins that are easy to communicate and can be used to build commitment and alliances, overcome resistance, convince gatekeepers, and motivate and increase credibility.
3) Guidelines for monitoring of gender equality projects
Work Package 3 has also developed a number of useful guidelines regarding monitoring that can be adopted to support the systematic structuring of monitoring activities in other organizational change projects. These guidelines are an important outcome of the project and some of the most important are described below.
Guideline 1: Monitoring activities should be an integrated part of the organizational change project
This means that monitoring should be a collaborative effort involving all project members and that it should be a continuous process throughout all the different phases of a project. The systematic and thorough approach to monitoring has been one of the unique and characteristic features of the GenderTIME project, setting it apart from other similar structural change projects. Monitoring activities have been at the core of the GenderTIME project during the whole project lifetime of 4 years. The development of the monitoring tools was the responsibility of the two Work Package 3 leaders but suggestions and requests from the consortium have been taken into account. It has also been of importance for the Work Package 3 leaders to feed back the analyses of the results from the monitoring tools to the GenderTIME consortium. This facilitated a dialogue within the consortium on monitoring, which further improved the monitoring activities.
Guideline 2: Monitoring tools should be flexible, diverse, tailor-made and easy to use
This means that monitoring tools should be adapted to the specific phase in which they are used. They should be developed while taking into account the results from previous monitoring activities Monitoring of the GenderTIME project was performed with a diverse and unique set of monitoring tools adopting a wide range of methods and performance indicators; questionnaires, checklists, interview guides and workshop concepts for team discussions. The development of the tools always started in the continuous analysis and reflection over preceding monitoring tools and the results from them. The three final monitoring tools were for example developed in order to complement previous monitoring tools and provide the implementing GenderTIME partners with monitoring tools of slightly different character. In the final phase of the project monitoring tools were used in order to contribute to a multi-faceted and comprehensive understanding of not only the final reflection phase but also the complete implementation process. It also became apparent that it was important to design monitoring tools that examined the impact of GEAPs relative to different country- and institutional-specific contexts.
Guideline 3: Monitoring should collect different types of information from different groups
This means that monitoring tools should include the direct involvement of both project members and so-called target groups or beneficiaries of project activities. Several of the monitoring tools have offered all GenderTIME team members the possibility to personally and individually reflect on the implementation process and progress in the project during the four years. Instead of focussing on collecting quantitative data these tools have covered the broader picture taking into account the experiences and knowledge gained by the team members directly involved in the work as change agents in their institutions. In addition to this, one of the monitoring tools in the GenderTIME project was used to collect personal change stories from people outside of the GenderTIME project who had participated in project activities and/or belonged to the target groups of these activities. The results highlight the importance of gathering information about the impact of structural change projects on people’s lives and on their working environment. This type of monitoring tool collects rich, qualitative data from change agents and target-groups – necessary for successful structural change projects.
WP4 Knowledge transfer
Objectives and Tasks
WP4 aimed at facilitating and supporting knowledge exchange and knowledge transfer activities about gender equality and gender action plan activities in academia and research. These knowledge transfer activities took place within the core group of project partners (‘consortium’; including so called Transfer Agents; see Thaler 2016), within the participating organisations (universities and research organisations), later also between these organisations, and finally beyond the consortium. The focus of knowledge transfer was not mere dissemination of project results, but moreover producing new and sharing existing knowledge by sharing good practices, learning from experiences from others and transferring knowledge from but also back to GenderTIME.
During the first eighteen months of the project, it was most important to support all partners in setting up the framework for the GenderTIME knowledge transfer, especially by including the Transfer Agents of each organisation in the project logic. Transfer Agents (mostly managers or gender equality officers) have been nominated in each organisation to enhance gender equality sustainably in all participating organisations. All participating Transfer Agents should not only have legitimated power in their institutions and therefore can transfer knowledge from GenderTIME into their organisations, but their position in the respective institutions is independent from the project, thus their work and networking will go on even when GenderTIME has ended. Secondly, GenderTIME brought also gender experts (members of the consortium) as multipliers into play, who transferred specific gender knowledge during on-site and dissemination activities. Additionally, the preparation of didactical concepts for knowledge transfer workshops and organising these events have been crucial to enable optimal learning of Transfer Agents and GenderTIME team members.
During the second eighteen months of the project, the third knowledge transfer workshop aimed at critically reflecting the project activities with invited experts (Ingrid Schacherl, Germany; Heather Laube, USA; Brigitte Ratzer, Austria, GenderTIME advisor); and discussing how gender equality in academia and research can reach more stakeholders on a policy level and how we can transfer existing specific success stories to a general level.
Generally in this project phase, the scope broadened to strategically organise more knowledge transfer possibilities externally (exchanges with ‘sister-projects’, with other institutions, with other scholars and with stakeholders in academia and policy makers) and bring knowledge from outside back to the project as well.
In the final year of the project, organising knowledge transfer activities aimed at other scholars and stakeholders (in academia and policy makers) and testing the GenderTIME toolbox. The main task in this project period was the preparation and organisation of a successful knowledge transfer workshop for stakeholders.
Additional tasks comprised organising feedback for (and improving) the GenderTIME toolbox and discussing a sensible format of “toolbox texting” for the stakeholder workshop (as part of GenderTIME’s final conference in September 2016).
Main results
From the perspective of the work package Knowledge Transfer, three key results can be mentioned as significant highlights of GenderTIME and also interpreted as general recommendations:
1. The successful implementation of Transfer Agents in the respective participating academic and research institutions ensures sustainable gender equality changes beyond project limits.
2. Providing detailed didactical guidelines for organisational learning activities supports the planning and organisation of gender equality knowledge transfer within the project group and in their organisations.
3. By including gender experts and stakeholders strategically in knowledge transfer activities (workshops, publications, etc.) gender equality knowledge can be co-created and thus help overcome the knowledge-to-practice gap.
The first significant result and major success factor of GenderTIME is the invention and implementation of so called Transfer Agents in all participating organisations (see Thaler 2016). These Transfer Agents have been defined as managers and/or gender equality experts from the respective institution, who supported the national project teams in implementing gender equality action plans and will take care of future gender equality issues in their organisations even when the project GenderTIME will be finished.
The framework of GenderTIME, using Transfer Agents proved as advantageous as it offers possibilities to produce sustainable changes within organisations (and with some transfer agents and consortium members also beyond). The following graph visualises the framework used in GenderTIME, using transfer agents, on-site visits and ongoing knowledge transfer activities:
Graph: Framework of GenderTIME (Thaler 2016)
Through sharing of “Knowledge Transfer Activities” by filling and sharing a report template, knowledge transfer activities from all partners have been collected. Comprising reflections of knowledge exchange events within their organisations, during onsite-visits, dissemination events and further multiplying activities, including stakeholder meetings. The analysis (from these reports) of the impact of transfer agents led to valuable insights:
Graph about the dependency of the impact of Transfer Agents (TA) by influence and commitment (Thaler 2016)
One result was that, if Transfer Agents have as well authority (meaning institutional and external influence; for instance a Transfer Agent who is member of the institutions’ management and also part of policy networks), as well as what we call “GenderTIME knowledge” (referring to knowledge about gender equality issues in research and about gender action plans and the commitment to share these ideas and the knowledge), the impact is highest. We assume, the higher both (authority and knowledge/commitment) are, the more stable gender changes in organisations and ideally changes in policies could be. In our cases most transfer agents seem to have a medium or even high influence within their organisation, and all partners are very engaged in knowledge transfer activities beyond their own institutions.
The second important result is connected to the detailed didactical concepts which have been developed and shared (Thaler 2016) for all knowledge transfer workshops and gave additional information. For instance, included were guidelines for introducing the topic of knowledge transfer within GenderTIME to the Transfer Agents, by giving background information on learning organisations and on embedded knowledge. Other topics were enabling GenderTIME internal knowledge exchange (How can we learn from each other? How can we share knowledge on good practices?) preparing visits to other institutions (“on-site visits”) with the aim to take the knowledge exchange on another level. Institutions can learn from other organisations in their country, because they operate within the same legal framework; but they can also learn from on-site visits to other countries, if organisation-cultural aspects are comparable. Through feedback loops (during knowledge transfer workshops) these experiences of knowledge sharing (within the own organisation, within the consortium or with organisations in the same country or beyond) led to individual and organisational know-how, which shaped future knowledge transfer activities.
Importantly, all knowledge transfer workshops (closely prepared and performed with project partners) offered knowledge about the content of gender equality actions as well as about the process (How did we change our organisations towards more gender equality?). During the GenderTIME project, more and more methods used during these knowledge transfer workshops (like small group discussions; world cafè; etc.) have been transferred to other regular project meetings, to present findings and discuss topics, and thus changed the project on a process level too.
A third important outcome can be described as co-production of gender equality knowledge by strategically including gender experts and stakeholders in knowledge transfer activities – which goes beyond the originally planned knowledge transfer.
Additionally to results within the scope of knowledge transfer (like various book and other publications, organised knowledge transfer events etc., which all aimed at transferring GenderTIME knowledge) changing gender practices and gender policies in research and academia sustainably is based on exchanging gender equality knowledge with experts and putting this knowledge into actions with relevant stakeholders in various communities. Therefore two specific highlights of GenderTIME were
1. the “Stakeholders-Workshop about Gender Equality in Research and Academia” where GenderTIME members and experts and stakeholders from all over Europe exchanged and produced knowledge in an interactive setting in September 2016 in Paris; and
2. the joined book publication of University of Wuppertal and IFZ (Dahmen & Thaler 2017), which not only co-produced knowledge within a gender expert community, GenderTIME and its sister projects, but moreover helped co-producing gender equality knowledge with additional actors. Some of these actors have traditional academic gender expertise; others gained gender action experiences on a very practical level. This co-created gender equality knowledge helps reaching a broader community in science and research.
WP5 Independent evaluation
Objectives
The objective of WP5 was to provide a guided evaluation process that covers both the cooperation and collaboration within the consortium and the impact of the goals of GenderTIME:
- the implementation of gender equality measures
- the sustainable implementation of action plans
- the participation and career advancement of women researchers.
The evaluation was aimed at the process of learning, accountability, and impact assessment and guided the project over its whole lifetime. Thus, the process involved all participants at certain stages of the project in order to offer all GenderTIME team members including the Transfer Agents the possibility to personally reflect on the impact of the implementation progress on an individual and on an organizational level. An external team of evaluators, who were not involved in the project otherwise, ensured an unbiased view from the outside. The evaluation was developed as a permanent guidance for the project team in terms of the (working and communication) process and the participating institutions with regard of the impact assessment.
In terms of the impact evaluation we developed different evaluation steps for the participating institutions, of which the core elements are a “Prerequisites Checklist” filled by every implementing institution at the beginning and at the end of the project and secondly regularly structured interviews with Transfer Agents and WP-Leaders. The reason why we rather followed this mixed approach with quantitative data which are enriched by qualitative information, was not only the complex question about organisational change but also the great variability of the participating organisations.
Thus, the achievements of Work Package 5, however, extend beyond these project-specific results, and also include results that are of a more abstract and general character, because these results fill a gap in existing literature on gender equality change projects.
Main results
Implementation of gender equality measures
To better understand the gender equality status quo in the different organizations, the organizational context has to be taken into account: The seven implementing institutions are highly different in size with respect to staff (see table 01): They range from small organizations with 15 employees (IFZ) to medium sized organizations (LOU: 153, Pupin: 421 employees) and to large universities (UNIPD: 2118, UPEC: 2650, BUW: 3081 employees). Furthermore the institutions not only differ in size, but also in their academic background and organizational form.
Table 01: Participating Organizations and Gender Equality Measures
Size of Organizations Academic Background Organizational Form Number of Measures Gender Action Plan
Staff Students 2013 2016
IFZ 15 0 interdisciplinary, ICT small research association (partially university, partially non-university) 11 37 Since 2013
UNIPD 2118 58136 Multiple major university 15 15 Since 2013
UPEC 2650 33000 Multiple major university 40 40 Since 2014
Pupin 421 0 ICT mid-size R&D institution at Belgrade university 23 23 Since 2012
BUW 3081 19000 Multiple major university 11 15 Since 2013
LOU 153 1153 School of Civil and Building Engineering small university 34 36 Since 2013
Tecnalia 1281 172 sustainable develop;
industry &transport; ICT; health; sc.& soc. applied research center 12 12 Since 2014
Although starting from a very high level of gender equality politics in 2013, all seven organizations had different objectives / starting points and motivations to maintain a Gender Action Plan. These differences are due to the national / local law and or institutional differences and contexts.
Pupin, for example, maintains an existing gender action plan since 2012, most of the institutions took the opportunity of this project to build an overall plan since 2013 and two more (Tecnalia and UniPD) started to work on this topic since the beginning of the project.
With regard to these differences within the status, the knowledge exchange through workshops and other group techniques was crucial and successfully triggered by the project team (WP4) by stimulating discussions about the successful implementation.
Thus within the last four years of GenderTIME the participating organizations put a lot of emphasis and development into the sustainable implementation of gender equality measures, but rather didn’t develop new actions, which explains the relative stable numbers of actions reported. There is only two organizations (BUW and IFZ), which significantly increased the number of actions, focussing on the goal of increasing the participation and career advancement of women researchers. They report some new actions regarding the processes of staff development and assessment procedures, cf. table 02.
As to summarize: The Gender Action Plans bring gender issues into different organizational practices and procedures, which were often not handled in a gender-sensitive way before. Asked about organizational practices and the feasibility to implement measures to support the goals of GenderTIME, the organizations report that measures under the umbrella of „work-life balance“ are more easy to handle and more easy to argue with the management, as they are supposed to „gain acceptance because not only targeting women”: All organizations have implemented measures to support work-life balance (cf. table 03).
It seems that due to the project the transfer agents and change agents have been able to connect the gender topic and implementation of gender equality measures to broader management issues, and mapped out a strategy to combine this with existing human resources topics.
Table 03 gives an overview which areas are managed in a gender-sensitive way in the different organizations. The most frequent ones are processes for recruitment (IFZ, UNIPD, Pupin, Tecnalia) and for post-employment communication (IFZ, Pupin).
Table 02: Gender issues related to management processes at the organizations
Gender issues in ... BUW IFZ LOU UNIPD Pupin UPEC Tecnalia
o management processes x x
o staff development programs x
o assessment procedures x
o quality assurance procedures x
o recruitment, retention, tenure & promotion x x x X x
o post-employment communication x x
Procedure for gender discrimination x x x
Reports of gender discrimination / ombudsperson x x x X
Internal gender monitoring x x x x x x
External gender monitoring x
In addition some organizations implemented regular working groups and established new rules such as: the “Hub Committee and Welfare and Communication Committee” at LOU, or the “Gender Equality Monitoring” at PUPIN . Along with the development and maintenance of a new system, which aims at collecting and using gender aggregated data UNIPD was able to build a system of indicators to better understand and monitor GenderEquality . At IFZ the development of a new salary system was seen as a “window of opportunity” to analyse and reflect on gender inequalities.
Others implemented new measures that don`t need lots of extra budget, and therefore will be pursued after the project: Examples are: Lunch meeting at BUW, Peer mentoring groups at IFZ, the Interdisciplinary Master Day at UPEC, or “Gender at Noon” at UPEC.
Table 03: Measures to improve work-life balance
Measures in ... BUW IFZ LOU UNIPD Pupin UPEC Tecnalia
o Timing of departmental meetings
and social gatherings x x x x
o Supporting dual researcher couples x x
o Work/life-balance x x x x
o Part time possibilities x x x x x
o Job flexibility x x x x x x x
• Sustainable implementation of action plans
With regard to the sustainability of these Gender Action Plans, the concept of the transfer agents (GenderTIME) seems to be very promising in terms of the sustainability: Thus, transfer agents overtook more than a symbolic role within the project.
These persons were nominated by each organization who should guarantee the implementation of structural change in their institutions. Although the frame conditions differ from partner institution to partner institution, most Transfer Agents were in a powerful position, where they hold budgets and could overtake decisions in human resources.
The attitude towards GenderTIME was mainly positive at the beginning of the project and showed that the transfer agents are convinced of the advantages of the GenderTIME project: Almost half of the group explained, that GenderTIME is “somehow a really big motor of things to do”. “Thanks to this project, at least, we have in mind the real situation” or “this is a fantastic moment to look into the organization”.
After four years of project work there was even more a positive attitude towards the activities as most of the Transfer Agents see a lot of different ways of impact at the institutions. They stress not only the collaboration with the other institutions, but also the bringing in of examples from other institutions and picking up new things.
Due to the project they gained argumentation power towards the management of their organizations and they have been able to build up a strategy for establishing actions for gender equality.
The project triggered a lot of knowledge exchange and discussions about the status of the organization itself, workshops and stakeholder meetings with delegates from other institutions helped to create a network of knowledge, which is recognized as a big opportunity, not only by the transfer agents itself, but also by other involved persons. All stress that they have been able to gain benefits by having been involved into this project, they were able to build up some very specific knowledge about how to approach the management and about how existing strategies can be connected with the implementation of gender equality action plans. Thus, the knowledge transfer among the partner organizations established already a fruitful network, which was shown at the GenderTIME conference and knowledge transfer workshops.
• the participation and career advancement of women researchers
Knowing that a change process and implementation work will not end after a four years project it is counterproductive to present some statistics that more or less show a status quo. But even in this small period the ambitious work of the participating organizations results in a change and move forward with regard to the percentage of female researchers, students and professors, as the following Figure 01 shows.
Figure 1: Percentage of women at students/researchers and professors
WP6 Methodology for structural change
Role and tasks of UNIPD and UPEC
UPEC and UNIPD teams have had two distinct but complementary roles in the WP. The WP6 started on M18 (mid 2014) with the shared tasks to compare and analyze the different GenderTIME experiences and to confront them to existing methodologies for structural change (UPEC), to develop specific instruments to detect and monitor gender equality (UNIPD) and to provide a general methodology as a “toolkit” available to all institutions (UPEC).
Comparative analysis among GenderTIME action plans
It is important to notice that each partner had designed an action plan independently, according to its needs, before the beginning of the project. This methodological choice implied an inductive approach when comparing and collecting the outcomes of the project. There were no “a priori” common classifications to organize the actions and/or the practices. It was one of the challenges of WP6. Starting the “lesson learnt” from the implementation of the self-tailored action plans in each institutions of the consortium (see WP2 and 3), that is providing some important indications on what to stress (data collection for example), what is more important to achieve (solidarity and favour of the offices and of the institution in general to gender arguments) and what we still lack (resources, permanent and dedicated staff for these type of monitoring and evaluations).
GenderTIME methodology and other similar methodologies
Methodologies to implement, monitor and evaluate actions plans are inspired either by quality insurance management – as Athena Swan for example – and propose grids and assessment sheets which invite the participants to reflect on the process with the help of an external evaluator, the final goal is a certification; or they are inspired by statistical methods, the idea is to collect data and to build indicators, the goal is to improve the numbers. In addition, usual qualitative methodologies for social studies may be used: surveys, interviews, focus groups, to understand the experience of the different stakeholders and the challenges they experience. We want to emphasise what we can learn of the recent projects funded by the EU during FP7 and H2020, and from parallel experiences as ATHENA SWAN and NSF ADVANCE.
In terms of contents, the different GAPs or GEPs (Gender Action Plan or Gender Equality Plan) propose different “measures” or “activities”, basically we find in all projects: a systematic qualitative and quantitative data collection, surveys though questionnaires and interviews, regular reports on the outcomes, events (workshops, mentoring sessions, conferences, courses), changing procedures (e.g. quotas in boards and committees, better transparency and formalised processes etc.), changing regulations (maternity leave, part-time and flexibility, child care, double careers, ... ), promoting gender in the content of research, sharing knowledge, disseminating. GEPs organise all the actions and all the data according domains or topics.
When analysed in detail, the GEPs face some critical issues:
- They are designed to be adapted to many different local contexts in terms of disciplines, size, etc. with various degrees of institutional autonomy.
- Another critical issue is the short time frame. A systemic change is hard and even impossible to measure in 3 to 5 years (average duration of the projects). Numbers are changing very slowly, and there is often no clear outcome to measure beyond self-assessment.
- Relating to this issue, the multi-layered dimensions of the problem and the interactions of the GAP with the overall context are never considered. Regarding gender equality, we do not know what have been the impacts of many factors such as the economic crisis and budget cuttings, the new management of research, etc. (Godfroy, 2016)
GenderTIME Toolbox
During the last period of the project (months 30 to 48), WP6 team has focused the attention on its “core mission”, the implementation of a “toolbox”.
When analysing the methodological tools proposed in GEP and in the existing toolboxes, some common challenges, also faced in GenderTIME, may be identified:
- Access to data, plus issues regarding the retrieving, the cleaning and the confidentiality issues. Lack of harmonised categories to make comparisons, even when categories look similar at first glance. What is a A position? The A position is defined in different ways in the different countries (Le Feuvre 2015).
- Lots of useful data are sometimes available but time consuming to retrieve.
- Lots of interesting data does not exist (on time allocation, on cultural climate, on well-being). The lack of data is supplied by “cultural surveys” or questionnaires.
Tools for monitoring the implementation
The second step in all projects is the monitoring of the implementation of the GEP. Usual solutions (including in GenderTIME) are tables and form to follow-up the implementation. The challenge is to include the multi-dimensional information and comments, when keeping relatively easy to read documents. In addition, as mentioned above, the short time-framework, the interactions with other issues (as budget cutting) and the small numbers (in some cases) do not allow observation of changes in numbers.
UNIPD in charge for building the System of Indicators UNIPD-GEI
UNIPD concentrated its efforts in the building of a system of indicators called UNIPD-GEI with a domain-based structure, inspired by the EIGE_GEI domain-based index on gender equality. Nevertheless, in our specific case, although highly relevant, the EIGE Gender Equality Index shows the limit of addressing countries (which means population and use of macro data), instead of single research institutions (which means dealing with people and with the use of micro data). That’s why the UNIPD team decided to build a new model based on the intersection between that of EIGE model and the one proposed by the “Sister Project” GenisLab, whose aim was to implement a very interesting “gender budgeting” approach in the academic context.
Our proposal followed a hierarchical top-down approach: starting from the general concept, several domains and sub-domains were identified, presenting indicators, the necessary variables and the data collection. Thus, the conceptual model driving the data collection in the UNIPD approach was based on seven domains: work, money, power, health, knowledge, space and time.
In addition, we described the methodology for the computation of the elementary indicators, the indicator that compares women and men and gives the gender gap for each sub-domain. Several other aspects were considered, such as: the direction of the indicator, the normalization, the age standardization, the weighting coefficient for non-responses.
The UNIPD team completely designed the new tool to be used in Academic and Research Institution, having defined the statistical model to calculate the composite indicator starting from the simple indicators relative to each domains/sub-domains. A test on this tool based on an on-line questionnaire was carried out at UNIPD last September and some preliminary results were presented to the Consortium during the meeting in Loughborough (month 36). The conceptual model, the methodology of the Systems of Indicators, the statistical model at the basis of UNIPD-GEI, The text of the online survey and some results were published in the book: S.Badaloni L.Perini (Eds). A model for building a Gender Equality Index for Academic Institutions, Padova University Press http://www.padovauniversitypress.it/publications/9788869380983 All the developments of the research were presented in subsequent meetings of the Consortium in 2016. Finally, the System of indicators and the calculus of the UNIPD-GEI index were presented at the University of Padua on Dec. 7th 2016 in an international meeting in order to share the results and foreground of the Project within our University and some representatives of European Institutions (http://gendertime.dei.unipd.it). Both the on-line questionnaire and the UNIPD-GEI are part of the TOOLBOX implemented by UPEC as a result of the whole efforts made in GenderTIME to try and select the most useful tool and the most successful best practices provided by the partners of the consortium in the last four years.
GenderTIME Toolbox
The basic idea of the toolbox is to make available all the experience gained in the GenderTime project when implementing action plans. It is eventually open to new inputs from other institutions after the end of the project. The toolbox is available at http://www.gendertime.org/Toolbox. The tool was developed by UPEC and UNIPD in collaboration with PUPIN for the technical support.
The structure is based on five parts: 1) Contextual information as legal frameworks, glossary, etc. “What is gender mainstreaming?”, “What is Gender Equality Plan?”, the “Role of Transfer Agents”. 2) The UNIPD-GEI index presented in on an introductory page with a link to download the full information in PDF: “GenderTIME index”. 3) Overall objectives: presentation of tools and methods and good practices by objective 4) Practical tools and methods (templates for surveys, interviews, data collection, evaluation, etc.) out of context 5) Good practices (case studies, success stories, etc. implementation experiences) in context. Part 4 and 5 have common categories to allow browsing among the different parts. Different ways of circulating across the information are proposed to the user, according to his or her needs: 1) By overall objectives: knowledge exchange, collecting and analyzing data, awareness raising and education, staff development, improving working conditions, management and policy-making, evaluation and data monitoring. Each objective is linked to tools and good practices, providing methodological tools and examples in context. 2) By EIGE domains, with subdomains adapted to university and research: work, money, time, knowledge, space, health, power (space has been added by UNIPD). Only good practices are available through this classification, but it is easy to connect this knowledge to the UNIPD-GEI index to get the measurement tools.
Recommendations for measuring gender equality in Structural Change Projects
One of the main contributions of Work Package 6 concerns the production of new knowledge about gender equality measuring systems both from a methodological point of view and a practical one. The tool UNIPD-GEI has been conceived in a very general way to be easily adapted to different Academic and Research Institutions at European level. In a season strongly based on the assessment of scientific production considering only mainly the impact factors of the Journals it should become mandatory to include for each Institution its degree of achieved gender equality. To this aim the Network of Structural Change Projects can constitute an important cross-cutting dissemination network.
Recommendations for future research: we are at the same time drawn in data and lost in terra incognita.
- More data could be collected systematically by institutions (about publications, project funding, research leaves, fellowships, etc). Maybe the definition of common EU norms to describe publications and research projects could be explored.
- Today the focus of GEPs is mostly on STEM, or STEM and HSS, there are very few studies on medicine, law, economy, philosophy, etc..
- Data from PhD and habilitation reports, evaluation reports, recruitment reports, lab reports should be exploited more systematically. We also recommend a better focus on the academic specificities.
- Our Last recommendation is building bridges with related research. First with statistical index to measure gender equality as EIGE, UNIPD has worked a lot in this perspective; second, bibliometrics and scientometrics, academic rankings, ACUMEN project and CTWS in Leiden have paved the way for this approach.
WP7 Dissemination
Introduction
The objectives of Work Package 7 in GenderTIME were: 1) to support the other work packages in spreading information about the project and the implementation activities by establishing and maintaining the GenderTime portal, 2) to enhance fruitful comparisons and interchanges between Institutions by providing e-collaboration tools, and 3) to sustain project activities after the end of the project and at the continuation of the projects results and activities, including responsibilities and intellectual property rights.
The three most significant results of Work Package 7 can be categorized as follows:
4) Establishment, customization and maintenance of the GenderTIME portal;
5) Development of e-collaboration tools including the implementation of the GenderTime Toolbox;
6) Providing support for dissemination activities including the organization of the GenderTIME Conference.
1) Establishment, customization and maintenance of the GenderTime portal
In the very beginning of the project, aimed at promoting project results to external stakeholders, the GenderTIME portal was established by PUPIN using the latest Internet technologies. It consists of two parts: the public part (see rectangles in blue) and private part (see rectangles in red).The public part of the portal presents the GenderTIME project, the accomplished results, the GenderTIME related events (project meetings, conferences, seminars, etc) and the GenderTIME Toolbox. The most updated site on the private part of the portal is the News section (sixty nine news were posted in the last 4 years). The GenderTIME Conference web page, http://www.gendertime.org/Conference was updated according to the conference preparatory activities in the last year of the project. The GenderTIME toolbox materials were linked to the public site of the portal, see http://www.gendertime.org/toolbox/toolbox.htm.
2) Development of e-collaboration tools including the implementation of the GenderTIME Toolbox
The private section of the portal is accessible for registered users only (55 users, members of the GenderTIME consortium including transfer agents) and is used for sharing and exchanging information between the project partners. The private content is classified into 14 categories (e.g. event, forum, meeting, on-site visit, etc). Currently the private space is composed of 77 pages that link to more than 850 attachments (images and/or documents).
Besides the GenderTIME portal, the most convenient way for sharing information inside the consortium is the mailing list consortium@mail.gendertime.org. In order to further support the e-collaboration, analysis and dissemination of the results, PUPIN implemented
• the Culture Staff Survey – Analysis tool, as a collaboration between WP3 (Monitoring) and WP7 (Dissemination);
the GenderTIME Toolbox, as a collaboration between WP6 (Methodology for Structural Change) and WP7 (Dissemination).
Tool for analysis of Culture Staff Survey
GenderTIME ToolBox
3) Providing support for dissemination activities including the organization of the GenderTime Conference
In the very beginning of the project, as part of Work Package 7 activities, a dissemination strategy and detailed action plan for its implementation was defined. Specific objectives were drafted for each year of the project and adequate approaches were proposed e.g. standard instruments, like publicity and promotion materials (leaflets, posters, etc,.), web site, conference and journal papers, but also targeted actions such as organization of meetings and public events with the ˝sister˝ projects such EGERA, STAGES, GENOVATE FESTA, GENIS LAB, INTEGER, STAGES and others, see Related projects. More information about the dissemination activities is provided in Section II (4.2 Use and dissemination of foreground) of the Final Report.
1. 3. 2. Results obtained by partners implementing a Gender Equality Plan
Seven partners implemented a Gender Equality Plan during the 48 months of the project.
IFZ (Austria)
Introduction
IFZ (Inter-University Research Centre for Technology, Work and Culture) is a small-scale research institute (founded 1988) in Austria, which cooperates closely with Klagenfurt University; primarily financed with research fundings. The research unit „Women* – Technology – Environment“ is active in EU-Gender-Projects since 2001, and part of gender studies/modules in Graz and Klagenfurt University. The initial Gender Equality Action Plan for IFZ comprised a monitoring of the career processes (Who makes what kind of career at IFZ?), a reviewing of the salaries (Is the salary scheme at IFZ gender equal and fair?), assessing work ideals (How is work-life-balance at IFZ? How does work-life-balance at IFZ influence career?), improving career support (What do IFZ employees need?) and disseminating good practice (How can knowledge be transferred?).
Main challenges, achievements and reflection
Three challenges had to be met during GenderTIME. First, due to the small size of the organisation for all quantitative (survey) and qualitative (focus groups, interviews, workshops, etc.), the whole staff needed to be motivated to participate; otherwise the significance of the results would have been too low. Second, gender and especially equality had to be positioned as an organisational, not a ‘women’s topic’. Third, the economic crisis led to reduced research fundings and reduction of staff, which resulted in an attitude that the institute faces bigger problems than gender equality right now. None of the three problems is IFZ-specific and so the ways they could have overcome might be of interest for other research organisations too.
The success factors at IFZ were manifold. Whereas one challenge was the small size of the organisation, this helped also to reach the whole staff easily (regular staff meetings; presentation of GenderTIME results, etc.). At one of the first staff meeting a gender report has been presented and the results showed that although gender equality was one of the basic values at funding IFZ, some gender inequalities happened (e.g. concerning part time jobs), because gender equality has not been formally fixed. By introducing GenderTIME with this gap between the initial idea of an gender equal institute and the reality, the willingness of the staff to work together on the gender equality action plan has been high. Another positive influence factor, were the GenderTIME resources to help initiate structural changes. Finally, the Transfer Agents were very committed and used their influence in the organisation to make sustainable system changes at IFZ:
▪ New salary system (incl. recognition of parental leave times)
▪ Gender report with detailed IFZ gender data (presented at staff meeting)
▪ Guidelines for barrier-free and inclusive event organisation
▪ Regular evaluation of work-life-balance and work stress factors
▪ Coaching (based on evaluation results) & peer mentoring group for women
▪ Knowledge transfer activities for students (lectures, seminars), gender networks (conference, meetings), (higher) education organisations (workshops, lectures, panel discussions), and media.
▪ Co-production of gender equality knowledge (book by IFZ and BUW: Dahmen & Thaler 2017)
Significant highlight 1: New salary system
A Transfer Agent and a GenderTIME member were asked by the IFZ management board to join working on organisational change measures. One outcome of these discussions was a new salary and career model that inhibits individual salary negotiations in the course of recruitment and promotion processes (which were the main factors of gender inequalities, although the previous system enjoyed a reputation of being gender fair – until it has been proven otherwise with a gender report). By applying the new model based on objective and transparent criteria a gender gap in salaries can now be avoided. Furthermore, the new salary scheme deals with parental leave like with educational leaves or research stays abroad: they count like normal working times, so salary advancements are not hindered by parental leaves; and parenthood in research at IFZ is not seen as career-hindering, but valued positively.
Significant highlight 2: Book
Anita Thaler (IFZ) and Jennifer Dahmen (BUW) edited a book about “Social Gender Justice in Academia and Research”), which can be seen as a successful co-production of knowledge effort. One half of the book chapters has been written by Austrian and German (plus one US American) gender scholars. The other half included knowledge gained through framework programme activities funded by the European Commission, like GenderTIME (four book chapters by six authors) and three sister projects (INTEGER, STAGES, FESTA, one book chapter each). Through this approach the book serves not only the knowledge transfer to people outside these framework programme projects, but worked as a co-production of knowledge activity between GenderTIME, other sister projects, gender experts and gender equality officers. The focus of the book lies not only in the analysis of gender inequalities and recommending activities theoretically, but explicit aimed at sharing hands-on experiences from implementing gender equality action plans or specific gender equality measures and their evaluation. With this approach, practitioners in academia and research should be motivated to use the book (parts of it) for their gender equality actions in their own organisations.
The book was also already presented by Thaler (IFZ and Dahmen (BUW) in an Austrian gender studies conference in December 2016 and discussed with a very relevant target group of GenderTIME (gender scholars of various disciplines and gender equality officers of Austrian universities and research centres; „Soziale Geschlechter(un)gerechtigkeit in Wissenschaft und Forschung“, presentation of Anita Thaler and Jennifer Dahmen at the 4th annual symposium of the Austrian Society for Gender Research, „UN|GLEICHHEITEN REVISITED. Konzeptionen und Interventionen kritischer Geschlechterforschung“, December 2, 2016, University of Linz, Austria).
University of Padua (Italy)
Introduction
The University of Padua was established in 1222. Today, in 2016, the academic staff counts 2075 professors (of which women are 710), 2275 administrative and technical staff employees (women are 1385) and 57.665 students (women 31.392). The University is divided into 33 departments grouped into 9 schools, representing the second biggest institution in our country.
The first Equal Opportunity Committee was elected in 2002. Since 2013 the equal opportunities issue has been carried out by three different organisms CUG, the Commission for Equal Opportunities and Gender Equality and the Gender Monitoring Lab (the last one created as a GenderTIME positive Action). The first three year Action Plan was released in 2003, the last (the current one) in 2015.
The main objective of the UNIPD team was to monitor and measure Gender Equality in Academia and in Research Institutions, achieved through many different steps as described in the next paragraphs.
UNIPD Action Plans APs
UNIPD entered the project GenderTIME in 2013 with an AP including measures on work/life balance, career paths and fair conditions of work and study, equal representation at decision level, elimination of gender stereotypes and promotion of a culture of equal opportunities. Our objective in GT was to expand the focus of the actions towards some crucial points regarding the career of permanent and non-permanent teaching staff. In order to better achieve these results, we decided to include in the UNIPD GT goals the creation of a permanent organism called Gender Monitoring Lab (Osservatorio di Ateneo per le Pari Opportunità) set in October 2013. Its aim was both the collection, the organization and the analysis of data on the presence of women at any stage of their career path at UNIPD and the monitoring of the “gender in research” issue as well as the gender policies implementation. It is a gender equality organism connected to other Equal Opportunities organisms. Since many data are not available at and usable level, in 2014 we decided to launch a campaign of data retrieval on the Composition of Commissions, Boards, Decision Making bodies, etc from a gender point of view. The campaign was launched again in 2016 to detect possible changes. The existence of this organism, born in the framework of GenderTIME, is central for the sustainability of the implementation of gender equality tools.
In 2015 the University of Padua adopted a new three year Gender Action Plan (Piano di Azioni Positive 2015-2017) in which new keywords such as Gender Budgeting, courses on Gender in Science at PhD level, proposed in framework of GenderTIME Project, were included.
In 2016 we offered a training course on Gender Budgeting to the mid-management Staff of the University. Then a specific Commission was appointed by the Rector in order to elaborate the Gender Budgeting of the University of Padua.
UNIPD tools for monitoring Gender Equality
Methodological analysis in order to develop a system of indicators for measuring Gender Equality in Academia started in 2014 together with the implementation of the first tools developed in the framework of GenderTIME Consortium:
• the Cultural Staff survey to detect the degree of Gender equality awareness of the Academic permanent and not permanent staff (2014)
• the Glass Ceiling Index - GCI to measure the glass ceiling effect in two Departments of our University (STEM and HSS) to be compared the GCI of the partners of the consortium (2015)
In 2016 we elaborated and implemented the UNIPD-GEI system of indicators for measuring Gender Equality in Academia in the framework of the WP6 (started on M18 of the GT project). We developed a domain-based conceptual model to measure GE in Academia, built by integrating EIGE Gender Equality Index approach re-defined for the Academic environment with the approach proposed by one of the FP7 “Sister Project” GenisLab, thus leading to model for collecting data based on seven domains: work, money, knowledge, time, power, health and space. The conceptual model, the methodology of the Systems of Indicators, the statistical model at the basis of UNIPD-GEI, and some preliminary results were published in a book:
S.Badaloni L.Perini (Eds). A model for building a Gender Equality Index for Academic Institutions, Padova University Press ISBN: 97888693809, 2016.
A more detailed description of the present research has been reported in the WP6 report.
At the end of the Project, December 7th 2016, we held a Workshop in Padova titled Gender Equality in Academia to share the results and foreground of the Project within our University and some representatives of European Institutions (http://gendertime.dei.unipd.it)
University of Paris-Est Creteil (France)
The GenderTIME project was implemented at the University of Paris-Est Créteil (UPEC) from January 2013 to December 2016. Monitoring and improving career development and opportunities, creating gender balanced decision bodies, collecting and analysing data on staff and disseminating good practices represent the most important measures implemented during this period. The GenderTIME project at UPEC was implemented at the university as pilot project covering particularly 4 out 12 faculties.
During this period (since 2012), the legal framework has changed in a very positive way regarding gender equality in the academia with the Sauvadet law (2012) and the Fioraso law (2013). Some measures proposed in the GEP have been implemented through laws as measures to have gender-balanced governing boards in universities and gender-balanced recruitment committees. This supporting political context has been a big asset for the success of the GenderTIME action plan. Nonetheless, in the same period, we have also experienced backlash with the activism of some very conservative groups fighting against a supposed “théorie du genre” and denigrating gender studies.
Main GenderTIME objectives at UPEC were changing the organisational culture and raising awareness. To achieve this objective, UPEC team has built two different networks:
- A network of researchers in gender studies, they were involved as experts and advisers for gender policy, they also had the opportunity to share their research, which is very important in an interdisciplinary field as gender studies, and finally they gained a much better visibility for their field. The participation to the network was open on a voluntary basis, a mailing list has been established to share information.
- A network of gender equality officer correspondents. This network was built at institutional level to support the gender equality officer in each faculty. Head of faculties were asked to appoint an “equality correspondent” (“correspondant•e egalité”), the network of correspondents was a transmission belt between the gender equality office and the management of each faculty.
To develop courses and research on gender and equality issues at the University was another action aimed at increasing awareness on gender at the University.
In this direction, two Interdisciplinary Masters Days on gender issues were held in March 2015 and in March 2016 in the context of the International Women's Day and organised in close collaboration with the network of gender studies experts, and with the professors providing gender courses. The purpose of the Days was to allow students to debate in public on the results of their researches before the defence and to explore new avenues. The Days were held in the afternoon, the first one was gathering ten (10) Masters students presenting their thesis, all women and the second one with fifteen (15) presenting students, including three (3) men. Around fifty students attended the day each year. Topics covered were varied, from the occupation of the game spaces by the boys and girls in kindergarten, to the consideration of the video games from a gender perspective, gender in advertisement and marketing, or gender in the history of teachers’ profession. The network support was crucial for the success of the Interdisciplinary Masters Days.
In addition, a list of courses and degrees related to gender issues, a list of professors involved in gender studies, have been published on the website of the gender equality office. The aim was to provide more visibility for gender studies and to facilitate the identification of gender courses.
To promote and develop research on gender and equality issues, seven (7) recent books and research on gender equality written or directed by UPEC staff or students have been presented and discussed via conferences. Focus groups with academic staff to discuss and share their experiences have been officially appointed by six (6) heads of faculty and grouped nine (9) memberships in a network as representative of their institutions. The other purpose of this network was to support the GenderTIME team to implement measures in each faculty as equality correspondents.
To inform on gender issues was another action aimed at increasing awareness on gender at the University and have led the team to create the first Gender office Website with the support of the Department of communication at the beginning of 2015 for disseminating the GenderTIME project results and main information about gender events.
The UPEC social departments are now better informed about the procedures to be followed with how addressing sexual harassment in Higher education, through the spread of the relevant guide, produced by the CPED, ANEF and CLASCHES. Colette Guillopé, UPEC gender equality officer, played a leading role in the production and the publication of this guide.
Gender aware communication has been promoted. The department of communication is aware about the official guide issued by the Haut Conseil à l’Egalité femmes hommes to promote an epicene language in French public communication. The guide is shared to department staff, and has been adopted as a method of communication.
The reviewing and the monitoring of career development and career opportunities of academic staff have been studied through analysis of data collected from the Human resources department. The results have been then compared with the results of the focus group and interviews conducted among eighteen (18) academics (nine women and nine men) to better understand the collected quantitative data. The database provided by the department included all UPEC staff, so, the team took the opportunity to analyse data regarding non-academics also. The index developed by the UNIPD team for academia and science was partly experienced and has been very useful.
The close collaboration carried out with the department of HRM gave opportunity to monitor the UPEC Social Audit in a gender perspective and to include a new Parity and governance chapter.
The dissemination of good practices beyond UPEC has been achieved at the Île-de-France level and at the French national level through two (2) Gender Equality Officers networks, covering about 68 institutions including universities, engineering schools and research organisations in Higher education and research. The UPEC team have worked with one the networks for a couple of years, between June 2014 and September 2016: a guide on the main achievements of the Île-de-France network, and a practical manual dedicated to the new gender officer in higher education and research were published.
One of the main outcomes learned from these experiences is the need to anticipate the other institutions’ or departments’ or colleagues’ expectations and to find points of convergence to work successfully together in a gender perspective. The gender agenda must not be perceived as an extra work or an extra burden, but as better way to advance its/her/his own agenda. The perception of a common agenda is the key to initiate a “snowball effect” and an extension of the initial target population to students, librarian staff and social workers.
Institute Mihajlo Pupin (Serbia))
Introduction
The Institute is the biggest and the oldest R&D Institute in ICT area in the whole SE Europe. It is affiliated to the University of Belgrade, with almost 65% of employees with engineering background, most of them recruited directly from the University through internships/diploma work.
The initial Gender Equality Action Plan (GEP) for PUPIN included evaluation of existing gender equality practice with focus on research and engineering staff, and introduction of new measures by adopting best practice from GenderTIME partner organizations. Some of the objectives of the PUPIN GEP were:
• Improve Employment opportunities for all at the Institutional Level
• Identify the cause of the actual gender distribution
• Improve support mechanism for the young researchers, careers development and networking
• Improve Culture, Communications and Departmental Organization
• Assess Career breaks
• Understanding why women leave engineering
• Disseminating good practice
Both quantitative and qualitative approaches were used to gain a better understanding about the work situation of female and partly also male staff members.
Achievements and Impact of GenderTime at PUPIN
The activities that were initiated in the GenderTIME framework were motivated by the decision that the structural changes that would be achieved through the GenderTIME actions should not reflect negatively on the performance of the PUPIN Institute as a whole. During the implementation of the GenderTIME Action plan the number of women at the management positions, number of awards won by female staff (see Figure), number of promotions of engineers in scientific titles approved by the Ministry of education, science and technological development were increased.
Currently (February 2017), the female share 1) at the company level is 38,4%, 2) among engineering staff is 37,4 %, 3) among PhD staff is 40 % (see Table). PhD MSc (old program) MSc (Bologna)
Engineering staff Overall
(PhD + MSc)
F M F M F M F M
01/2013 35 65 55,1 44,9 34,4 65,6 36,9 63,1
01/2017 40 60 52 48 37,4 62,8 38,4 61,6
University of Wuppertal/Germany
Introduction
The University of Wuppertal (BUW) was founded in 1972 as one of several so-called comprehensive universities in North-Rhine Westfalia. The position of a gender equality officer exists already since 2000. A staff unit for gender and diversity issues attached to the rectorate was established in 2013.
At the time of the conclusion of the GenderTIME project the female ratio at the institution is as follows:
• Female students: 52% of 20.957 persons in total (incl. PhD students)
• Female professors: 24,60% of 252 persons in total
• Female academic staff: 35,4% of 740 persons in total
The initial Gender Equality Action Plan (GEAP) for BUW included, besides the implementation and organisation of new measures, also the evaluation of already existing gender equality actions with focus on a target group analysis. Therefore interviews and focus groups as well as quantitative surveys were realized to gain a better understanding about the work situation of female and partly also male staff members. The areas of action included: Reviewing and monitoring the employment situation, the career possibilities, specific career support for female research staff, improvement and assessment of work-life-balance issues, and dissemination of gender knowledge inside and outside
Achievements and reflection
The initial planning of the institutional GEAP was only the starting point at BUW. After a first assessment of needs new actions were created respectively planned measures re-defined.
The analysis of salary and employment duration of scientific staff members at BUW led to a discussion about gender and precarity, which highlighted that women are over-represented in non-permanent contracts with lower working hours and shorter duration. For identifying this area of inequality lacks in the availability of gender-segregated data had to be overcome, which made own calculations of the national GenderTIME team necessary. The scientific staff council now annually reviews the development of the employment situation and keeps the topic up and present. The results of the quantitative staff survey, which was implemented in all GenderTIME institutions offered insight into the perception and acceptance of gender equality of the academic staff at BUW. Getting nearly one-quarter response rate of staff members for a quantitative survey on gender equality was already regarded as a small success. The survey was especially helpful for gaining a better understanding about certain resisting voices and the current working atmosphere at the university. For instance it became obvious that many persons perceive gender equality as somehow of ‘omnipresent’ topic, although they are not well informed about actual offers and actions of the office for gender equality.
Further in the first year of GenderTIME BUW successfully attained the next and final level of the Research-Oriented Standards on Gender Equality set up by DFG (German Research Association). During the project lifetime a need for exchange and networking between gender scholars at BUW developed. Besides other smaller actions a so-called lunch or brown bag meeting was organized by the GenderTIME team, which was highly appreciated by the participants. Further it helped to enhance the visibility of gender research at the institution. BUW team members put also a lot of effort into networking, exchange and reflecting with other change agents and gender equality practitioners. With doing so they contributed to dissemination and exploitation of BUW-related and general results of GenderTIME. These are just some insights into work, which happened at BUW. Generally a project like GenderTIME can be seen as an impetus for change but the real process is much more long-winded and complicated to tackle, maybe even more at an organisation which already had accomplished a certain grade of equality.
Loughborough University (United Kingdom)
Introduction
The School of Civil and Building Engineering (SCBE), Loughborough University, is one of the UK’s largest self-contained interdisciplinary built environment schools, with 68 academic staff, 26 research staff, 14 laboratory technicians and 24 support staff. The wide-ranging research activities span civil engineering (infrastructure, transport, water and waste management) and the built environment (building energy demand, construction technology and organisation), with the recruitment of new architecture colleagues promising further expansion. The Research Excellence Framework (REF 2014) results revealed:
• Quality - Over 75% of the School’s research was rated as world-leading or internationally excellent
• Impact - 95% of our research was rated as world-leading or internationally excellent for its influence on society, the economy and policy
Through the GenderTIME project we planned to thoroughly investigate gender inequalities in our institutional context and devise tailored activities to counter the challenges that women face in participating and thriving in academic research. To do this we focused on the following objectives: Evaluate existing institutional policies; Identify the ‘leaky pipeline’, causes and counter measures; Improve support for research staff; Review careers development and networking; Improve culture, communications and departmental organization; and Disseminate good practice. The action plan we designed and implemented over the course of the project aimed to meet these objectives. Here is a table of some of the activities carried out by the project team.
Assessment of existing policies and practices Ongoing input into institution’s Research Staff Association Set up and support Hub Committee Set up and support Welfare and Communications Committee Ongoing support of Athena SWAN activities
Staff Surveys in 2014 and 2016 EPSRC fellowships workshop Managing your academic career workshop Leadership for women workshop Seminar celebrating National Women in Engineering Day
International seminar on gender equality in engineering HE Exit Interviews with former members of academic and research staff Focus groups with academics and research staff Career narrative interviews with new academics Workshop with new academics to discuss findings of interviews
We conducted two surveys with all school staff over the course of the project. The first, a benchmarking survey was conducted in 2014. This was repeated in 2016 and allowed the team to pinpoint any changes that may be indicated by the staff responses to these questions. SCBE‘s GenderTime Transfer Agent says – A crucial task was conducting surveys with staff in 2014 and 2016, and qualitative interviews over the course of the project. This provided us with insights into the effectiveness of our policies and practices and their impact over time.
TECNALIA RESEARCH & Innovation Foundation/Spain
Introduction
TECNALIA is the 1st applied research Centre in Spain and one of the most important in Europe. It was established in 2010 as the result of the merging of 8 different organisations from the Basque Country (Spain).At the beginning of the project female total staff represented the 42,21%, female researchers the 38,51% and 38,34% of PhD (January 2013) but there were important vertical and horizontal segregations. First steps towards cultural and organizational integration started in this new organization through GenderTIME project.
The initial Gender Equality Action Plan intended to:
• Carry out an in-deep analysis of the gender and diversity issues.
• Design and implement a new tailored action plan with measurable actions towards equal opportunities for employees.
• Create the preconditions for structural change.
Action Plan (TAP) was built from a diagnosis of the situation regarding gender starting from the establishment of a diversity and gender policy. Awareness and dissemination activities (internal and external) related with gender issues were also considered. TAP also covered the review of employment policies and procedures, the analysis of the career progression and the equal pay of research staff. Existing work-life balance measures (flexible time-table, tele-working, additional holidays), were analysed and promoted from the gender perspective.
During the project lifetime quantitative surveys were conducted to gain a better understanding about the work situation of female researchers. The high response rate obtained let us to think that this is a relevant issue in the organisation. The survey examined the experiences and perceptions of the working environment, among research staff and the objectives were to determine the forms of intervention and target actions to promote transformational change to ensure gender equality. This was a good starting point for the action plan implementation. The monitoring tools (developed in WP3)– questionnaires, checklists, interview guides, guidelines for small team discussions etc. also helped involving target groups in the monitoring process.
In these years, the project has contributed towards a better reflection on the impact of gender equity measures at institutional level and the identification of structural factors that hinder or support gender equality at the organisation. In this regard, the adoption of work-life balance measures had high impact (flexible time-table, tele-working, additional holidays buying i.e) together with the establishment of permanent participatory structures for reflection. Though the implementation of actions the percentage of female researchers, showed a change and move towards greater equality. On the other hand, monitoring and evaluation mechanisms were difficult to implement, as well the targeted transformation of mind-sets and the institutional culture.
Nowadays there is an on-going reflection in place related to the sustainability of the implemented actions with a special focus on giving a step forward understanding the causes of the segregation and identifying systemic barriers. This will be materialized through a new Gender Equality Plan including new actions and indicators the will be implemented in TECNALIA. The plan will incorporate the results and conclusions of the GenderTIME project. A task force has been created with the aim of monitoring the governing bodies (rules and processes of access) and to identify barriers to achieve a balance (26% of the management positions are female). Other actions will be the definition of measures to identify and reduce barriers related to gender and access to governance.
Working closely with the other partners, engaged in extensive and targeted dissemination activities throughout the lifespan of the project and also inspired good practices to be implemented in TECNALIA and enhanced knowledge exchange.
Potential Impact:
1.4 The potential impacts
There are presented here the potential impacts of the results obtained by the project GenderTIME.
- potential impacts by Work Packages
- potential impacts by partners implementing a Gender Equality Plan
1.4.1. Potential impacts by Workpackages
WP2 Implementation process management
WP2 contributed to:
➢ Create organizational and structural change to transform institutional practices through the implementation of real action plans to support gender diversity and equal opportunities between women and men.
Structural change in universities and research institutions means making them more gender aware. This has important implications for equal opportunities, scientific careers and quality of research. Promoting structural change in GenderTIME institutions implied a step forward removing obstacles to womens´professional careers.
Reviews of organizational processes such as recruitment, performance evaluation, and advancement are likely to identify ways in which structural change would result in achieving organizational goals.
WP2 focused upon the development and implementation of the action plans within a common conceptual framework. The implementation of action plans on recruitment, retention and promotion policies, supporting work life balance measures, updated management and research standards, and supporting policies for dual careers couple, etc. supported by WP2 helped to this objective.
Through the combination of and close cooperation of WP2 and WP3 (Monitoring) the project contributed towards a better reflection on the impact of gender equity measures on an institutional level and the identification of structural factors that hinder or support gender equality in scientific organisations.
➢ Increase of participation and career advancement in institutions.
Though the implementation of actions the percentage of female researchers, students and professors within the participating organizations showed a change and move towards greater equality. (Task 5.13 Final Report about cooperation evaluation and impact evaluation of the implementation and the knowledge transfer of GenderTIME– finalized, Dec. 2016).
➢ Ensure the continuation of implemented activities through the Transfer Agent figure and created permanent structures.
The sustainability of dedicated gender equality structures at institutional level is important. Ensuring the sustainability related to gender equality can be challenging.
The concept of the transfer agents’ in GenderTIME is linked to the actions sustainability. These persons were nominated by each organization who should guarantee the implementation of structural change in their institutions. They are in charge of knowledge transfer and are devoted to the change process and they supported sustainable implementation within their organizations after the project.
➢ Identify good practice examples and case studies.
GenderTIME also stimulated the reflective learning processes among the beneficiaries and the organizations involved. In WP2 the institutional pairing exercise took advantage of the differences between institutions and research teams’ strengths by promoting a closer relationship and providing a framework for collaborative knowledge sharing. The compilation of success stories in partner institutions collected in D2.3 highlights in a qualitative way the main achievements since the beginning of the project and gave the partners the chance to tell the story of the action plan implementation including the highlighting of successes and difficulties.
WP 3 Monitoring
The potential impacts of WP 3 on institutional practices and culture in European research and scientific decision-making bodies primarily concern three key aspects of organizational, structural and cultural change: 1) monitoring activities; 2) synergy building, and, 3) change agents.
1) Impact: monitoring activities in structural change projects
The results from WP 3 can potentially impact the quality and success of monitoring activities in future structural change projects. When monitoring activities are developed in these projects they need to fully utilize the unique experiences and extensive knowledge gained during four years of intense monitoring work in WP 3. The monitoring tools and the monitoring methods developed in WP 3 have been tailor-made to fit the GenderTIME project but they may easily be transferred and adapted into the context of other projects, even those whose focus lies not on gender equality. The 12 monitoring tools developed within WP 3 therefore constitute useful resources for practitioners, gender equality experts and researchers.
2) Impact: synergy building in structural change projects
The results from WP 3 can potentially impact the quality and success of future structural change projects if these projects adopt monitoring tools that facilitate capacity and synergy building. The monitoring tools developed in WP 3 allowed change agents to share, reflect and discuss experiences concerning similar challenges, hindering factors and structural barriers, which often appear in all organisational settings. The monitoring tools thus created arenas for knowledge exchange, peer consultation and mutual support. These arenas were organized in each implementing GenderTIME partner institution separately but also on a consortium level through workshops during GenderTIME project meetings. The result is a dynamic and constructive environment where innovative solutions to problems appeared.
3) Impact: change agents in structural change projects
The results of WP 3 can potentially impact the position of change agents in structural change projects if they acknowledge how precarious working situations for change agents can negatively affect the outcome of such projects. A precarious situation can restrict the powers and authority of the change agents and threaten the legitimacy of the project and potentially endanger the whole project. The results from WP 3 illustrate the need for institutionalisation processes concerning gender equality work, e.g. through ensuring permanent, fully funded, positions for change agents. The status of gender studies also needs to be strengthened through academic professionalization processes that can legitimate this type of (action) research and increase the prestige of this field. Only then can structural change project be truly successful.
Main dissemination activities
Background, approach, progress and results of WP 3 have been continuously disseminated throughout the project lifetime. Both WP 3 leaders presented their work on European and international conferences to interested stakeholders and target groups. The feedback of the audience supported the critical reflection of the work undertaken and encouraged the WP 3 leaders at the same time to pursue their approach due to the positive comments on their work. To support the exploitation of the results, a selection of the most significant monitoring tools developed in WP 3 has further been made public in the GenderTime toolbox, prepared by WP 6. Further, WP 3 has also developed a number of useful guidelines and recommendations regarding monitoring, including a handbook, that can be adopted to support the systematic structuring of monitoring activities in other organizational change projects.
WP 4 Knowledge Transfer
The impact of GenderTIME’s Knowledge Transfer is closely connected to its activities aiming at sustainability:
1. Establishing powerful allies in all participating academic and research organisations: Transfer Agents.
2. Sharing didactical guidelines for organisational gender equality learning activities for academia and research.
3. Co-producing gender equality knowledge with gender experts and stakeholders to overcome the knowledge-to-practice gap.
1. Establishing powerful allies in all participating academic and research organisations: Transfer Agents.
By including Transfer Agents (managers and/or gender equality experts from all participating institutions), the national project teams had powerful support for implementing gender equality action plans and moreover they will take care of future gender equality issues in their organisations even when the project GenderTIME will be finished. Transfer Agents have authority within their organisation and are part of science policy networks, so they have expected impact on more stable gender equality changes in their organisations and ideally changes in science policies as well. Within the GenderTIME project period, positive results from Transfer Agents have been reported on organisational levels (see the impact reports of all participating partners), and on regional as well as national levels (several networking activities have taken place; new networks established; contacts to science policy makers used for gender equality issues).
2. Sharing didactical guidelines for organisational gender equality learning activities for academia and research.
By publishing detailed didactical concepts (Thaler 2016; GenderTIME toolbox) for all knowledge transfer workshops and additional information on learning organisations, embedded knowledge, enabling internal knowledge exchange (How can we learn from each other? How can we share knowledge on good practices?) preparing visits to other institutions (“on-site visits”) and organising feedback loops (during knowledge transfer workshops) these project experiences of gender equality knowledge sharing have potential impact to support other organisations too.
One impact could be seen during the GenderTIME project, as more and more knowledge transfer methods described in the guidelines (like small group discussions; world cafè; etc.) have been used in regular project meetings, and thus changed the quality of the project on a process level.
3. Co-producing gender equality knowledge with gender experts and stakeholders to overcome the knowledge-to-practice gap.
A third and – generally speaking – very important impact is to overcome the knowledge-to-practice-gap by co-producing gender equality knowledge with gender experts, practitioners and stakeholders outside the consortium. The knowledge-to-practice-gap can be seen as one reason for the lack of implementation of scientific knowledge into policies and actions (Karner et al.). By including relevant stakeholders in knowledge exchange (or better knowledge co-creation) activities, the need to translate scientific outcomes into practical and usable terms and dealing with resistance can be minimised, as these are included in the co-production process already. One example is the GenderTIME book (Dahmen & Thaler 2017) for German speaking countries, with their specific legal and cultural context (for instance the special role of “außeruniversitäre Forschung”, research centres outside classical academic/university institutions). One half of the book chapters has been written by gender scholars. The other half transfers knowledge gained through framework programme activities funded by the European Commission, like GenderTime (four book chapters) and three sister projects (INTEGER, STAGES, FESTA,).
References
Dahmen, Jennifer & Thaler, Anita (eds., 2017). Soziale Geschlechtergerechtigkeit in Wissenschaft und Forschung [Social Gender Justice in Science and Research]. Barbara Budrich Verlag.
Karner, Sandra, Thaler, Anita & Wicher, Magdalena (2017). Wie durch gemeinsame Wissensproduktion in der Gender-Forschung soziale Geschlechtergerechtigkeit in Wissenschaft und Forschung befördert werden kann. [How co-production of gender knowledge can lead to more social gender justice in academia and research]. In: Dahmen, Jennifer & Thaler, Anita (eds.). Soziale Geschlechtergerechtigkeit in Wissenschaft und Forschung. Barbara Budrich Verlag.
Thaler, Anita (2016). Learning Organisations in Science and Research: The Role of Transfer Agents in Gender Equality Change Processes. Graz: IFZ Eigenverlag. Download: http://www.ifz.at/eng/Media/Dateien/Downloads-IFZ/Publikationen/Learning-Organisations-Transfer-Agents_Thaler-2016 [15.7.2016]
WP6 Methology for structural change
The potential impacts of WP6 concern mainly the synergic exchange of knowledge and practical experience in the framework of the Structural Change Projects in order to build a cross-cutting view on some key aspects: 1) comparing self-tailored action plans; 2) monitoring, measuring and evaluating change; 3) making change sustainable in a shared way.
In particular the results of WP6 can potentially impact the process of monitoring, measuring and evaluating change in Academic Institutions by means of the System of Indicators UNIPD-GEI and the GenderTIME Toolbox.
The System of Indicators UNIPD-GEI to measure gender equality in structural change projects
One result of WP6 is the definition of a new specific set of gender indicators to be used in Research and Academic Institutions. The idea was that to have an instrument for measuring the degree of implementation of gender policies in Academia at different times The Gender Equality Index UNIPD-GEI is a synthetic indicator obtained when individual indicators are compiled into a single measure on the basis of a multidimensional concept. It can constitute a useful instrument of comparison among Universities and Research Centers, both in Italy and in Europe. The System of Indicators developed at the University of Padua has been conceived to be used in very general way. So, it can be easily transferred and adapted into the context of other projects, even those whose focus lies not on gender equality. Not only: the system of indicators can identifies critical situations from a gender point of view.
The GenderTIME toolbox to monitor and to measure gender equality
The GenderTIME toolbox includes the UNIPD-GEI index and proposes in addition tools and methods out of context and good practices in context. The added value of this box is the ability to link the different tools and examples across objectives or topics to cope with the gaps and the heterogeneity in data collection. The use of a tool can be related to good practices in context and to measurement through the UNIPD-GEI index. The combination of different methodological approaches in a single toolbox, with on-field experiments and statistical approach completed by possible surveys provides a very comprehensive toolbox. This toolbox could be updated and open to new contents after the end of the project, it could also be part of a “toolbox of toolboxes” to be designed in the future.
Main dissemination activities
- FP7 STAGES Project - Gender and science. Advancements and resistances in fighting structural inequality”, Second session Dialogue on structural change «café scientifique», Brussels, March 25th, 2013
- TRIGGER Project - Second meeting among structural change projects, London, April 15th, 2016
- 4S Meeting 2015 in Denver, with a specific session on methodologies to measure structural change.
- 4S Meeting 2016 in Barcelona to present the main outcomes of WP 6.
- GEHE 2016 Conference in Paris
- Workshop Stakeholder, Paris 2016 ...
WP7 Dissemination
The potential impacts of WP 7 on gender related practices and culture in European research and scientific institutions are: 1) raising awareness of gender issues in scientific researcher careers; and, 2) sustainability and synergy building in structural change projects.
1) Impact: raising awareness of gender issues in scientific researcher careers
Through its ICT activities within WP7 (implementing the GenderTIME portal, http://www.gendertime.org/ and other e-collaboration tools), GenderTIME project enhanced knowledge exchange and established fruitful comparisons and interchanges between Institutions with different levels of gender-aware approaches and policies.
Through the Dissemination activities in the last four years (organizing events and participating at events, see Section II (4.2 Use and dissemination of foreground) adapted to different publics in the different European regions by core consortium members and /or by appointed experts (Transfer Agents), GenderTIME reached hundreds representatives of the research community, Gender equality officers in universities, research organisations and engineering schools and other stakeholders.
2) Sustainability and synergy building in structural change projects
GenderTIME consortium partners decided to keep alive the GenderTIME portal (at its present state) for ten years after the end of the project. The main results in a form of guidelines (tools) for implementing and monitoring structural changes (see http://www.gendertime.org/toolbox/toolbox.htm) are available online and could be integrated with other similar tools on EU level thus creating potential impact on the quality and success of future structural change projects.
GenderTIME consortium partners maintained and will continue to use the GenderTIME Twitter account (https://twitter.com/GenderTime). The account has 174 followers (status February 2017) including the ˝sister˝ projects and other projects (e.g. @festaproject @GarciaProjectEU, @genovatecafe, @INTEGERProject, @GENERA_H2020, @gendernet, Plotina Project EU, GEDII Project, TRIGGER at Birkbeck, HEIRRI project, @EQUALISTproject @WomenTechReligion, RRI-PRACTICE project) and international and national networks (e.g. @epws , European Women Rectors Association-EWORA, Irish Social Sciences Platform, STEM Gender Equality Congress, @GendernewsSE, @libra_science, Genus.se @FemmesSciences, @WomenInSTEM_fr).
GenderTIME Twitter account
1.4.2. Potential impacts expected by partners implementing a Gender Equality Plan
IFZ (Austria)
To start with easier actions (like peer mentoring groups) and improving already existing measures (like a gender report) helped building trust for GenderTIME at IFZ. Also teaming up with committed Transfer Agents (TA) who have influence, was key to gain impact. The experience at IFZ showed that the TA can learn gender equality knowledge, but it is very relevant to have a TA with high commitment and influence within the organisation. Finally by using legal requirements (like the necessity for work evaluation) and windows of opportunities (like salary scheme change), IFZ could – with GenderTIME resources and committed TAs implement sustainable changes for gender equality. The regular evaluation of working conditions at IFZ (including work-life balance), the continuous presentation of gender reports in staff meetings, the women’s peer group, and the new salary scheme have been successfully and formally implemented.
Finally, GenderTIME has be seen as a positive system changing project by the staff members as the communication about the project has been very transparent and the monitoring and evaluation activities had been used to get feedback from various staff (and not only GenderTIME project) members.
University of Padua (Italy)
The potential impacts of the GenderTIME project at the University of Padua deal mainly with two aspects:
1) Gender Budgeting
Data collection on the presence of women at any stage of their career path at UNIPD is already an ongoing process in the framework of the Gender Monitoring Lab (Osservatorio di Ateneo per le Pari Opportunità) built at the beginning of the GenderTIME Project and now belongs permanently to our University in an aware way.
In this context, a more advanced project, started in 2016, consists in the definition and the implementation of Gender Budgeting. The adoption of a Gender Budgeting allows to analyze and evaluate how the allocation of resources in an organization, which acts in an apparently "neutral" way, actually produces different effects on men and women. It also involves the integration of a gender perspective in the definition of priorities and strategies, and can impact on the promotion of equal opportunities and the development of human resources as application of the principle of gender mainstreaming in the budgetary process. According to the European Parliament resolution on Gender Budgeting of 3 July 2003, the GB is a way to assess the gender impact on budgetary policies. After a training course on Gender Budgeting that we offered to the mid-management Staff of the University of Padua, a specific Commission was appointed by the Rector in order to elaborate the Gender Budgeting of the University of Padua in the present year. Gender Budgeting is a keyword shared at European level as reported in the GARCIA Working Paper n 14 titled The Gender Budgeting in Academia – toolkit. Moreover, at Italian level, there is a network of many Universities involved in the development of GB, and in some cases it has been already calculated (e.g. University of Naples Federico II, University of Ferrara, University of Bologna, University of Pisa). The Conference of Italian University Rectors has recently taken a strong commitment to achieve this objective in Italy.
2) Gender Culture Dissemination
The critical mass connected to the Structural Change EU Projects like GenderTIME has surely induced a process of general transformation due to the fact that a lot of European Academic Institutions have adopted gender policies for supporting women in their careers promoting Women in Science and Technology. But effective changes happen slowly and are difficult to tackle. One main point is that relevant changes for women in Science can take place starting from a consciousness of gender: the double membership in profession and gender of a women scientist has the potential to shape and disseminate such a consciousness. Then it is crucial to disseminate such a culture through corses, seminars, workshops. Gender Equality has to fight discriminations based on stereotypes because stereotypes are stronger than any laws and policies.
The UNIPD team of GenderTime has dedicated a lot of energy and effort on this issue organizing courses on Gender in Science at First-cycle degree courses and at PhD Schools.
University of Paris-Est Créteil (France)
GenderTIME project has implemented six main good practices. The practices have been tested at UPEC and have been shared during two years with eight other universities in the Paris area. A network at regional level has been set up by ECEPIE to create a multiplying effect and a place to share knowledge.
The following good practices have been experienced at UPEC and shared with the partners of the network: 1- three indicators used by the UPEC team in order to monitor the changes in researchers numbers regarding gender issues, including the Glass Ceiling Index for science and academia ; 2 - the purposes and conditions for creating and managing the “Gender correspondents” network to help for the implementation of the gender measures in each faculty; 3 - the gender studies experts network; 4 - the purposes and the organization of the “Interdisciplinary Gender and Master day” to promote gender studies; 5 - the purposes and the organization of “Gender at Noon” meetings to promote recent books on gender and give a better visibility to gender studies; 6 - the rule of equality established by UPEC to achieve gender-balanced recruitment committees and gender balanced governing boards, according to the French law.
The network members are representative of four universities including UPEC, one engineering school, two research institutes and one community of nineteen institutions in higher education and research, gathering in total at latest 142,800 students (including PhD students) and more than 34,000 researchers. The multiplying effect has been considerable. In their role as Gender equality officers enforced by law, the network members are an important vector of change towards gender and may influence their institutions.
Furthermore, the experiences learnt from GenderTIME has been shared within the Gender equality officers’ association (CPED) at national level, gathering today sixty-eight French Higher education and research institutions.
Concerning the potential impacts at UPEC, a new UPEC Gender equality officer (GEO), Dr. Lolita Ruben, has been appointed at the end of Pr. Colette Guillopé’s term. The measures initiated by the GenderTIME team will be, as far as possible, carried on after the end of GenderTIME. The new GEO plans to include the administrative staff and students as additional target population. The expected impacts would be to address the remaining six out of twelve (6/12) faculties not covered by the project. In total, the twelve faculties comprise 31 research labs, 33,000 students, 1050 non-academics, 1600 academics (women academics: 47%).
The GenderTIME measures and results at UPEC had been disseminated through fourteen (14) conferences, eighteen (18) general press and website articles, four (4) workshops, two (2) publications, two (2) exhibitions, two (2) posters and one (1) interview.
Institute Mihajlo Pupin (Serbia)
Three most significant achievements and impacts are related to 1) improved management of the scientific staff including employees’ qualifications and competencies, publications / patents / licenses, engagement in scientific communities, etc.; 2) raised awareness about GE topics that has high impact on female researchers and their ambitions in scientific and professional career; 3) extending the standard practice and monitoring approaches in the PUPIN Human Resources Department that will sustain after the end of the project.
University of Wuppertal (Germany)
Communication is a key for bringing the topic of a gender equal organisation forward, which also means that possible change agents or persons, who want to work on gender equality issues should not underestimated the time needed or organizing and implementing. Above certain persistence is necessary since organisations are usually not the fastest when it comes to changing structures. Therefore inclusion of people who are committed to the topic of gender equality and who know the institution well is indispensable. It is equally important to acknowledge also short-term wins and successes, which for instance focus on supporting a certain group of staff members. Third party funding clearly increases the visibility and recognition of gender equality as issue and gives the persons involved some kind of legitimacy to put the finger on existing inequalities which are likely to be overseen in the everyday work life.
TECNALIA RESEARCH & Innovation Foundation (Spain)
The most significant achievements and impacts are related to:
• Awareness and bringing the topic of a gender equal organisation forward.
Communication has been key factor to bring the topic of gender to the institutional culture.
• Engagement of decision-makers
It has been absolutely crucial that the persons in management were personally involved in the formulation of the institution’s gender policy and fully support the introduction, sustainable effect and the monitoring of the gender policy.
The concept of the transfer agents’ in GenderTIME is linked to the engagement of decision makers and actions sustainability. Transfer Agents are in charge of knowledge transfer and are devoted to the change process and they supported sustainable implementation within the organization.
• Improvement of Organisational Structures
At Institutional level, several permanent implementation teams and working groups have been created, including a committee called “open space”. These reflective exercises followed participatory approaches (e.g. through workshops and seminars).
• Career progression:
-Definition and deployment of the professional profile within the 2 careers paths defined (management vs. research).
- Developing a plan to increase female recruitment.
-Assessment on the obstacles to entry points for female recruitment.
-Support the revision of job descriptions and selection criteria to ensure non-discrimination
Loughborough University (United Kingdom)
The most significant achievements and impacts are related to moves towards greater gender equality in the quantitative data, a qualitative improvement in the experiences of staff over the time period of the project, and project sustainability and legacy.
Quantitative impact
Over a twelve month period six female researchers from the School have moved onto lectureships: There is an increase in the success of female ECRs in securing permanent academic appointments.
In 2016, women now represent 21% of staff, just above the national figure of 20% (HESA data) and the proportion of women Lecturers increased to 30% over the duration of the project (Table 1).
Table 1: Academic positions split by gender and F%
2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016
Position F M F% F M F% F M F% F M F% F M F% F M F%
Lecturer 5 22 19% 5 20 20% 4 17 19% 3 15 17% 3 15 17% 6 14 30%
Senior Lecturer 2 13 13% 2 17 11% 2 21 9% 4 22 15% 4 23 15% 4 20 17%
Reader 0 1 0% 0 1 0% 0 0 0% 0 0 0% 0 0 0% 1 1 50%
Professor 2 21 9% 2 20 9% 3 22 12% 3 22 12% 3 20 13% 3 19 14%
Total 9 57 14% 9 58 13% 9 60 13% 10 59 14% 10 58 15% 14 54 21%
Qualitative impact
The GenderTIME staff surveys conducted in 2014 and 2016 evidence perceptions of an improvement in useful networking opportunities and a large increase in understanding why the School takes action to encourage underrepresented groups to apply for posts, with increasing support for actions to tackle gender inequalities.
On an organisational level the project impacted on the school’s focus on gender as a topic, in particular through the support of activities in relation to Athena SWAN. SCBE completed a submission for an Athena SWAN departmental award to the Equality Challenge Unit, and the decision will be published later in 2017.
Sustainability
To improve the culture, communications and departmental organisation two new committees were established and will continue to be active once the project has ended. The Hub Committee is made up of and represents research staff and PhD students in the school and is centred on the working environment. The committee has held regular professional development seminars and social events. The Welfare and Communication Committee is made up of representatives from a range of staff groups and students in the school. One of the key aims of the committee is to promote gender equality.
The purpose of these committees is to encourage better information flow across all members of the school and to support initiatives that develop an inclusive working environment. Both committees are fully established in the School structure and will continue beyond the duration of the GenderTIME project. The consolidation of the GenderTIME project with SCBE’s commitment to the Athena SWAN agenda at School and Institution level has resulted in a mutually beneficial relationship between project and organisational objectives.
List of Websites:
1.5. Public Website and contacts
Public Website address : www.gendertime.org
Relevant contacts: Dr Yvonne Pourrat, Coordinator, ECEPIE, France
yvonne.pourrat@ecepie.fr
Dr Valentina Janev, Dissemination, web site administrator, Institute M. PUPIN (Serbia)
valentina.Janev@institutepupin.com
Main contacts by team:
ADDRESS GENDER TIME 2017
N° Partner Homepage Name email address
1 ECEPIE http://ecepie.fr/ Yvonne Pourrat yvonne.pourrat@ecepie.fr
André Béraud andre.beraud@ecepie.fr
2 IFZ http://www.ifz.at/ Anita Thaler anita.thaler@aau.at
Sandra Karner sandra.karner@aau.at
3 UNIPD http://www.gendertime.org/unipd Silvana Badaloni silvana.badaloni@unipd.it
Lorenza Perini lorenza.perini@unipd.it
4 UGOT http://www.gu.se/ Helen Peterson helen.peterson@gu.se
5 UPEC http://www.en.u-pec.fr/ Anne-Sophie Godfroy anne-sophie.godfroy@u-pec.fr
Bodo Clavreul bo.clavreul@gmail.com
6 PUPIN http://www.pupin.rs/ Sanja Vranes sanja.vranes@institutepupin.com
Valentina Janev valentina.janev@pupin.rs
7 BUW Jennifer Dahmen jdahmen@uni-wuppertal.de
8 LoU http://www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/civil-building/ Tarek Hassan T.Hassan@Lboro.ac.uk
Sarah Barnard S.H.Barnard@lboro.ac.uk
Andrew Dainty a.r.j.dainty@lboro.ac.uk
9 TECNALIA http://www.tecnalia.com/en/ Ezekiela Arrizabalaga ezekiela.arrizabalaga@tecnalia.com
Lucia Polo lucia.polo@tecnalia.com
10 DUK http://www.gendertime.org/DUK Karin Siebenhandl karin.siebenhandl@donau-uni.ac.at
• Project Logo: Download from http://www.gendertime.org/sites/default/files/GT%20logo_1.pdf#overlay-context=node/28
• Evidence of Dissemination activities:
o http://www.gendertime.org/Results
o http://www.gendertime.org/news
o http://www.gendertime.org/Stakeholders%E2%80%90Workshop
List of Beneficiaries: http://www.gendertime.org/sites/default/files/GENDER_TIME_2017_Contact_Details_of_beneficiaries.xls
1.1. Executive summary
The aim of the GenderTIME project was to identify and implement the best systemic approach to increase the participation and career advancement of women researchers in seven selected institutions across Europe (Austria, France, Germany, Italy, Serbia, Spain and United Kingdom) where self-tailored action plans had to be implemented. The plans had to deal with recruitment, retention and promotion policies, supporting work-life balance measures, updated management and research standards, supporting policies for dual career-couples, etc. . A crucial point was the real commitment of the organizational heads of each participant and the choice of a transfer agent in each institution.
The work done : The consortium cooperated on common actions; it monitored the implementation process by producing tailor-made monitoring tools; it organised knowledge transfer in GenderTIME institutions and externally (sister-projects, other institutions, other scholars and stakeholders in academia and policy makers); it evaluated the cooperation and collaboration within the consortium and the impact of GenderTIME’s objectives; it measured change in the participating institutions through evaluation instruments such as tailor-made indicators; it disseminated the toolbox for implementing structural change in institutions interested in similar approaches.
As planned the work was organised in four different phases:
1-Launching phase between months 1 and 6: building of the web portals and e-collaboration tools, editing dissemination material, 1st Workshop about knowledge transfer, definition of actions plans in each institution, first workshop with “sister” projects.
2- Installing phase between months 7 and 24, focused on the implementation and monitoring of the action plans and knowledge exchange among partners (mid-term report on the implementation of Gender Action Plans).
3-Reflecting phase between months 25 and 36, the implementation went on, it produced a report on the implementation of Gender Action Plans and a toolbox for implementing structural change in the context of any given institution.
4-Spreading phase oriented towards institutions out of the consortium: final international conference with proceedings, final version of toolbox (guidelines in 6 languages).
Main results: - Institutional mapping of existing policies and practices resulting in a set of seven recommendations for gender equality plans design and implementation;
- Guidelines for monitoring and implementation of gender equality projects;
- Successfully implementation of transfer Agents;
- GenderTIME toolbox online in the public project Web site;
- System of indicators “UNIPD-GEI” for measuring gender equality in academic institutions
Summary of main dissemination activities:
- Presentation of the GenderTIME project at more than 70 conferences (papers, posters) in Europe, America, and South Africa; participation in 10 round tables/ panels; publication of 3 books and 10 books chapters .
-Organization of 11 networking events with other projects (EGERA, STAGES, FESTA, GENISLAB, INTEGER, GENOVATE, GARCIA, TRIGGER, GENERA).
General comment: the project went on smoothly, all the deadlines were respected and, at every step, the collective work of the consortium was efficient, productive and largely disseminated.
Project Context and Objectives:
1.2. Summary description of project context and objectives
The project context
The under-representation of women in certain scientific disciplines, as well as in research decision making positions in most fields is well known and has indeed been a major concern for the European Commission since a number of years. Reports issued by the European Commission for the last decade (ETAN Report 2000, ENWISE Report 2004, Gender and Excellence in the Making 2004, She Figures 2003, 2006, 2009, 2012, 2015, WIRDEM Report 2008, Benchmarking Policy Measures for Gender Equality in Science 2008) highlight the fact that in spite of a growing number of female students in higher education, and an increased presence of women among PhD students, horizontal and vertical segregation remain salient.
The leaky pipe metaphor (Angier 1995) has been coined to represent the progressive decrease in the presence of women in science and technology at growing levels of the formative and professional route (Contarello 2008; UPGEM Reports 2008). The underlying causes of this phenomenon have been extensively studied all over the EU countries and the general conclusion is that contemporary science in European countries rewards, through various mechanisms, the male gender (Badaloni 2008). Policies for recruitment, retention, promotion and leadership of researchers in European research bodies often affect career progress of female researchers adversely. Moreover, when it comes to appointing skilled professionals to decision-making positions in national research and academic institutions, women are already at a disadvantage because of their smaller numbers, preventing them from participating more equitably in the highest echelons of science. Even in the fields where female graduates and doctoral students are more numerous (as social sciences, humanities, biology, etc.) we observe an under- representation of women in research decision-making positions, less opportunities to reach full professorship. Pre-conditions and causes of the “brain-drain” or “glass ceiling” are multifaceted and complex in each of the EU Member States.
To actively involve more research and higher education institutions, it is important to consider the processes of transformation which universities and research institutions have undergone during the past decades, and which have challenged their existing structures and modes of organisation (Kogan 1994). In EU-28 European countries, the transformations that underlay current challenges to academic and research institutions include the Bologna Process, the internationalisation of the academic and research landscape, an increasing number of students and a demand to provide more vocational training, when universities and research organisations are competing for limited financial and personal resources, facing issues of brain drain, but also new needs and expectations from early career and senior researchers.
The WIRDEM report released in April 2008 by the European Commission examined nomination procedures, cultural barriers and funding limitations hindering the progress of women in their academic careers, reviewed member states policies and existing procedures for evaluating and promoting researchers to senior positions, identified examples of good practice at national and institutional levels, and proposed recommendations for better targeted actions at the European level.
European and national systems of recruitment, retention and appraisal of scientific achievements are not gender neutral (Wenerås and Wold 1997, Olson 2002, Wächter 2010) and thus the percentage of female professors seldom exceeds 20%, and is even much lower in key fields of innovation and technological development. European science and research bodies cannot afford to exclude potential innovators. Thus, the role of women scientists has to be recognised by European research bodies as of crucial importance for the potential of innovation to European R&T development.
Glover (2002) argues on the base of European statistical data, that there are three different kinds of gender segregation:
1. vertical segregation (drawing pin model of the distribution of females: the higher in the hierarchy, the lower the number of females, also referred to as “glass ceiling“)
2. horizontal segregation (increased number of women in certain disciplines and professions with lower pay and careers options)
3. contract segregation (women more often have short term contracts and find themselves in an insecure employment status ).
Glover has also demonstrated that regarding persistence, women who stay in scientific employment have a more short-term and discontinuous attachment to the scientific labour market than men. Female scientists are also are more likely to exit at an early stage of their careers or move into part-time work when they become mothers (cf. http://www.scenta.co.uk/uploads/athena/athena/report17.pdf).
The Global Gender Gap Report 2010 published by the World Economic Forum (WEF) highlights several areas specifically important for the interconnection of gender equality, productivity, growth and development. These are girl’s education, women’s labour force participation, women as consumer, women and spending decisions, women and leadership (The Global Gender Gap Report 2010: 30f). The report states that a nation’s competitiveness highly depends on how the women are educated and if the nation takes their talent into account. In order to maximize its competitiveness and developmental potential each country has to reach gender equality. The European Commission has stressed again in its recent communication paper to the European Parliament that innovation and competitiveness are central for the European 2020 strategy. The goal of becoming an ‘innovation Union’ can be reached for example through investing in research and development, by attracting and train young people to become researchers and at the same time offer internationally competitive research careers within Europe. Therefore each member state is encouraged to train enough researchers in order to fulfil the national research and development plans, also including the promotion of attractive employment conditions by taking into account gender and dual career models (Europe 2020 Flagship Initiative Innovation Union 2010: 8f). This also includes the idea that a more diverse research population might also lead to more innovation within the research and development area of each member state and this highly supports the encouragement of becoming an innovation union in general.
Again the Global Gender Gap report stating that the women’s economic participation in countries where women are as educated and healthy as men is still not striking. The authors demonstrate that business leaders and decision makers have to ensure to remove barriers of women’s entries into the work force
and need to support practices and policies “that will provide equal opportunities for rising to leadership within companies” (The Global Gender Gap Report 2011, p. 8).
Consortium countries 2011 rank 2011 score 2010 rank 2010 score 2009 rank 2009 score
Austria 34 0.7165 37 0.7091 42 0.7031
France 48 0.7018 46 0.7025 18 0.7331
Germany 11 0.7590 13 0.7530 12 0.7449
Italy 74 0.6796 74 0.6765 72 0.6798
Serbia - - - - - -
Spain 12 0.7580 11 0.7554 17 0.7345
Sweden 4 0.8044 4 0.8024 4 0.8139
United Kingdom 16 0.7462 15 0.7460 15 0.7402
This chart demonstrates a great variety between the current gender gap score of the participating countries (ranging from the lowest of 0.6765 in Italy to the highest of 0.8024 score in Sweden). One can tell from the Global Gender Gap Report in general that the Nordic countries have not fully reached gender equality yet but have closed the gender gap more successfully (Iceland, Norway, Finland, Sweden) individually reaching more than 80%. These countries have performed best so far in distributing available incomes, resources and opportunities between women and men. At the tertiary education level -- which is of interest for the GenderTIME project – the gender gap had been reversed and women are now in the majority of high skilled work force in the Nordic countries and in Sweden, Norway and Iceland more than 1.5 women for every man are taking up tertiary education (The Global Gender Gap Report 2010: 20f).
Notwithstanding the differences between national and regional contexts with regard to specific challenges and transformations, in all European countries, these changes have fostered the development of new structures of organisation and modes of governance of academic and research institutions. To varying degrees, new legislations for higher education and research have been adopted, introducing more autonomy and increased competition among academic and research institutions, with quality standards in teaching, research and management, etc. and certification procedures introduced as requirements for public support and recognition.
With regard to the issue of gender equality, the question is whether and to what degree the different European countries have integrated a gender mainstreaming approach, positive action schemes or e- quality insurance policy when implementing these policies in academic and research institutions, and how they have been translated into concrete measures.
Gender research and debate has provided a major contribution to the critical assessment of the prevalent structures and modes of governance in academic and research institutions and pointed out the gendered academic culture, career patterns and notions of excellence (Leemann, 2002; EMBO Reports 2007; CNRS/Mission pour la place des femmes, 2005; UPGEM 2008). This critical assessment has led feminist scholars to advocate the implementation of measures such as coaching programmes and mentoring schemes to support women’s access to academic careers. Today, research on management and staff development in academic and research institutions acknowledges the potential of such measures to foster institutional change, as results indicate that in institutions such as universities and research institutions, institutional change is achieved through the change of professional praxis and identity of actors themselves (Pellert, 1999, 2002).
The importance of the gender dimension to address questions such as leadership, staff development and governance in higher education and research institutions is also highlighted by research on leadership requirements (Bagilhole 2008) and by research on the impact of organisational structures and flows of communication to explain differences in research productivity between women and men (Whittington 2007).
Today, in many European countries, research and higher education institutions have made first steps to implement effective gender mainstreaming, integrating the gender issue in management processes, but also in staff and leadership development programmes and assessment procedures. Institutions have also started to integrate the gender dimension in quality assurance procedures to assess productivity and governance of academic and research institutions. However, important efforts are needed to foster the recognition of the fundamental importance of the gender dimension and of gender equality measures to develop adequate responses to challenges faced by academic and research institutions in Europe.
This need for institutional change within research bodies, and particularly within universities, has also been recognised outside Europe, most visibly in North America where it has been a central point of recent U.S. and Canadian initiatives. Programs such as the National Science Foundation’s pioneer ADVANCE program, have since 2001 successfully involved major universities into changing their policies and procedures for recruitment, retention, tenure and promotion, to improve the situation of women faculty, and have developed best practices as well as effective networking and dissemination approaches (ADVANCE).
Commitment of university leaders and top R&D decision and policy makers, is also a key feature of a recent report and call to action released by the U.S. National Academies in September 2006, entitled “Beyond Bias and Barriers: Fulfilling the Potential of Women in Academic Science and Engineering” (National Academies, 2007), which highlights a number of effective practices developed by U.S including those developed by ADVANCE-funded universities. This report has already led to significant initiatives being implemented by universities, federal funding agencies, professional societies and even U.S. Congress. Shortly before, the InterAcademy Council, which in June 2006 released an advisory report, had expressed a similar call to action and a set of practical recommendations more specifically aimed at national Science Academies (IAC, 2006) .
Such efforts offer useful examples of successful practices aimed both at increasing the numbers of women in research and enhancing their participation in decision-making positions, and complement European analyses and efforts. A fact the European Commission has fully recognised through recent call for proposals. The PRAGES project (Practising Gender Equality in Science), currently funded by FP7 Area 5.2.1.1. specifically aims at comparing the various strategies implemented in North America, Australia, and Europe for promoting the presence of women in decision-making bodies relating to scientific research in public institutions, and will be examined by our consortium.
Such analyses also help to highlight the impact of the European debate on gender equality and the measures that have been developed to foster women’s careers in higher education and research to develop responses to current challenges of academic and research institutions.
The objectives
GenderTIME’s general objective is to contribute to an organizational and structural change in European research and to disseminate at all levels the tools to implement it through the following specific objectives:
1. to identify among the participating institutions the best systemic approaches to increase the participation and career advancement of women researchers, at organisational level in each institution, at social and cultural level with actions aimed at changing the gender climate; at European level, through increasing cooperation between universities and research labs;
2. to define and implement realistic and effective self-tailored Actions Plans taking advantage of knowledge transfer between new-comers and experienced institutions across Europe;
3. to monitor and evaluate action plans through self-tailored monitoring tools;
4. to facilitate the transfer and exchange of experiences between partners through a mutual learning process and knowledge transfer workshops at different levels and exchanges of personnel;
5. to multiply the transfer and the exchange of experiences between the consortium and other EU higher education and research institutions in order to ensure a maximum impact of the project.
6. to produce a toolbox and monitoring tools to implement gender policies and structural change;
7. to disseminate the guidelines and monitoring tools.
Project Results:
1.3 Description of the main results
There are two kinds of results of the project GenderTIME.
- results obtained by Work Packages
- results obtained by partners implementing a Gender Equality Plan
1. 3. 1. Results obtained by Work Packages.
Each Work Package defined objectives, tasks and deliverables to achieve during the 48 months of the project.
WP2 Implementation process management
Objectives and Tasks
WP2 focused upon the development and implementation of tailor-made action plans at partner institutions. WP2 tasks allowed partner institutions to work independently within a common conceptual framework to devise specific measures to improve gender equity. Activities to support action plan implementation knowledge sharing between partners were also part of this WP.
Over the course of the project the following activities have been carried out:
During the first reporting period (M1-M18), in relation to Task 1, the state of the art of existing measures began by devising a template for partners to complete, to enable comparisons of information on existing policies and practices in each institution. The template asked partners to provide information on the national and institutional context; information on existing measures including information on the origin, implementation, limitations, actor, target group, finance, and evaluations conducted. The collection, comparison and analysis of the results are available in Deliverable 2.1. This task was led by the LoU team.
Whilst also investigating existing measures partners were asked to update their action plans in light of the information gathered – for example, if any particular gaps were identified these should be remedied in the action plans themselves if possible. Once the action plans were revised and reported on in Deliverable 2.1 each partner had responsibility to implement actions in their own institutional context over the course of the project. Updates and analysis of the action plans were collected in D2.2 in month eighteen. This task was led by the UPEC team.
A third focus in this period was to ensure the proper implementation of action plans through the development of facilitative tools. During the meeting in Wuppertal in December 2013 an internal workshop was held to allow partners to work together on action plan implementation through a discussion of successes and challenges. Following on from the workshop partners were asked to work more closely together in pairs to offer mutual support and guidance on self-defined aspects of the implementation process. This task was led by the Tecnalia team.
During the second reporting period (M19-M36) task leaders have facilitated the systematic collection of data on action plan implementation in partner institutions. Second, task leaders have made comparisons between the data collected and also coordinated with WP3 (Monitoring), WP4 (transfer) and WP6 (toolbox) the intersecting data and results among WPs.
WP2 is a continuous reflection of the implementation progress and feed directly into the work outlined in WP3 that monitors the progress of the measures established in WP2. During this month’s WP2 leaders collaborated with WP3 leaders on the data collection which attempted to enable streamlining of data collection across the consortium. Through the combination and close cooperation of WP2 and WP3 (Monitoring) first steps on a better reflection on the impact of gender equity measures and identification of structural factors that hinder gender equality at institutional level have been started.
The tailor made action plans sketched out at the beginning of the project have been further developed in these months and the action implementation followed up and reported by the Gender Time partners under support of their institutional transfer agents. For that purpose partner information has been collected in autumn 2014 and spring 2015 (feedback reports) on the occasion of project Consortium meetings in Bilbao (December 2014), Graz (June 2015) and Loughborough (December 2015). Once the action plans were revised and reported on in Deliverable 2.1 each partner had responsibility to implement actions in their own institutional context. Updates and analysis of the action plans were collected in D2.2 in month eighteen and further analysis was reported in D2.3.
The third WP2 activity in this period focused on supporting partners to work together on action plan implementation through a discussion of successes and challenges, obtaining guidance on self-defined aspects of the implementation process.
The enabling of knowledge transfer and collaboration between partners was initiated to support partners in action plan implementation and the difficulties that arise in such an endeavour. For that purpose several workshops were conducted. In these sessions’ key areas for knowledge transfer were highlighted and reported previously in D2.1 and D2.2. In this period a collective and guided reflection about the partners’ experiences when implementing the Gender action plans have also been conducted.
In the final reporting period (M37-M48), based on the definition and design of the project activities reported during the 1st and 2nd periodic report task leaders have facilitated the reflections on action plan implementation in partner institutions through collaborations with WP3 and WP4 and engagement in specific activities.
The main effort in this period has been done in maintaining cross-institutional relationships using frameworks for information sharing, alongside more informal networking time that is important to the maintenance of working relationships. The focus has been to offer information about possibilities for gender equality interventions, but also to stimulate reflective learning processes and knowledge sharing among the beneficiaries and the organizations involved.
All the partners presented their reflections about the implementation of measures in their institutions at the stakeholder workshop (WP4) held on the occasion of the Final Conference in Paris. The main conclusions were enclosed in each of the partners´ institutions Gender Time Action Plan Posters. More information can be found at: http://www.gendertime.org/GEP_implementation
WP2 leaders collected the main conclusions of the work done under WP2 in a paper that was presented at the project Final Conference: “Using communities of practice to support the implementation of gender equality plans: lessons from a cross-national action research project” (Barnard et al. 2016).
Main results
Institutional mapping of existing policies and practices
The eight institutions that took part in the mapping exercise outlined information about a total of 149 existing gender equality measures - an average of 19 measures per institution. The top three broad topics that these measure address are on ‘Institutional culture’, ‘Management and policy making’ and ‘Work-life balance’. This was encouraging for us at the start of our GEP implementation as it demonstrated that there were policies in place to address equality in the workplace around the key issues of the organisational culture, the ways management have mainstreamed gender equality and policy around the issue and the balancing work with private/family life, all of which have been raised in research as crucial for women in employment.
The mapping found that the three areas that have the least amount of measures are in relation to ‘salaries’, ‘recruitment’ and ‘staff development and support’.
An analysis of the levels of implementation of existing measures already in place found that 60 per cent of the measures listed had been fully implemented; 28 per cent had been partially implemented and a small proportion (7%) had not been implemented at all - some of the measures that had not been implemented had imminent plans for action. There were variances across partners with regards to the levels of implementation of existing measures – some institutions had fully implemented all measures, whilst others have lower levels of implementation, which suggests differences in organisational cultures with regards to gender equality policy and practice. The mapping clearly points to the impact of the organisational context on the ways gender equality measures are positioned in the institution.
Information about the measures was broadly categorised by topic: Careers development and networking; Institutional Culture; Management and policy making; Recruitment; Salaries; Staff development and support; and Work-life balance. The ordering of measures according to these broad categories, though an imperfect categorisation enables greater clarity in providing an overview of institutional gender equality policy and practice. It also provides a framework for identifying gaps and measures that could be transferred between institutions and possibly making comparisons between institutions.
The analysis was not only about assessing the state of the art of gender equality policies and practices across the institutions, the mapping exercise also resulted in a set of concrete recommendations for GEP design and implementation:
o Recommendation 1. Institutions should conduct evaluations of existing measures.
o Recommendation 2. Institutions should consider investing in policies that have only been partially implemented so far.
o Recommendation 3. Institutions with relatively low levels of gender equality activities should focus on initiating new measures, learning from the successes of other institutions.
o Recommendation 4. Identify the gaps around particular objectives in your own institutional activities and use the knowledge and ideas from other institutions to devise new actions.
o Recommendation 5. Research teams should build positive relationships with the key actors where this has not already been established. Working to enable communication and action between key groups of the institution should be part of the GEP for all institutions.
o Recommendation 6. Secure the commitment of people in the organization who are involved in change processes: the sustainability of dedicated gender equality structures at institutional level is important.
o Recommendation 7. Create tools for enhancing knowledge sharing and develop formal and informal space for this to occur. Organise events that bring the community together and make the most of the experiences of participants foster and enhance knowledge transfer.
These recommendations proved a useful starting point, based on up to date empirical data collected in institutions, which underpinned the methodology developed for supporting GEP design and implementation
Supporting Gender Equality Plans design and implementation
Learning from each other through institutional pairings
The mapping exercise highlighted the different starting points of the institutions in the project. Some institutions were based in countries with a strong gender equality policy framework and an established culture in addressing organisational equality and diversity objectives: whereas other institutions were relatively new to this kind of work. The institutional pairing exercise took advantage of the differences between institutions and research teams’ strengths by promoting a closer relationship and providing a framework for collaborative knowledge sharing. In a workshop environment participants were asked to consider the challenges they would like to address; the institution(s) that may help me to address them; strengths/success practices that can help others; and which institutions might benefit from my strengths/successes. In response to the answers given, teams were then paired up and given a set of structured questions to work through: at the end of the session a plan was mutually agreed for information sharing and support focused on specific tasks in the GEP.
An example of this includes: one institution sharing information about the system for collecting gender disaggregated data to an institution where no such system exists; another offered expertise in conducting focus groups; another described in detail the homeworking policy in place, including information on how this is evaluated at institutional level and the experiences of staff who work this way. One pairing looked in detail at academic career models and how careers develop in the institutional context. Clearly this kind of knowledge sharing is simply good practice on such a project, however, the pairing-model allowed more in-depth knowledge exchange – so we could ask questions about ‘what really happens in your institution’, to go beyond the rhetoric of written policy documentation, or even that which might be shared in a formal meeting context.
Sharing challenges and successes through World Cafe workshops
Workshops gave the opportunity for community members to have open discussions, to work closely together, to reflect on experiences and to offer mutual support and guidance on the self-defined aspects of the implementation. The overall reflection on experiences helped the group to specify ‘how to overcome challenging’ factors and ‘how to use supporting’ factors for implementation of the actions (e.g. how to overcome challenges or how to best take advantage of the success factors). A key success factor identified in the workshops is the good timing of the project in relation to other institutional activities. The workshops provided a secure environment for research team members to articulate and discuss the challenges faced in GEP work.
This has allowed creation of an overview of activities where complementarities can be easily spotted and possible areas for further examination identified. In this sense, the areas that have most similarities across the institutions are in the analysis of the attrition of women in HE, flexible working policy implementation, instruments for the evaluation of gender policies, mentoring and skills enhancing programmes, gender as a crosscutting issue, how to involve decision makers, bureaucracy resistances and communication.
From this point, this research represents not only an opportunity to implement gender equality actions, but is also a starting point to install a culture of reflection at institutional level. Identified challenges require supportive actions dealing with disaggregated data at institutional level together with internal (at project level and institutional level) and external communication (large scale) creating gender culture. Furthermore, we found in the workshops that efforts are needed to create a common vocabulary across the different institutions (and nations), evaluation methods require specification and more actions are needed to consolidate the commitment from the decision making spheres. The ability to openly discuss challenges and successes in a confidential and supportive community positively impacted on the research teams as they attempt to tackle a complex organisational issue.
WP3 Monitoring
Introduction
The objectives of Work Package 3 in GenderTIME were: 1) to develop monitoring tools, and 2) to monitor the outcome of the GEAPs in each GenderTIME institutions. In total 12 monitoring tools were developed and used to collect information about the progress of the implementation of the GEAPs. The information about the progress was compared with the project plans and constituted a starting point for on-going reflections by the GenderTIME members and discussions about proposals for corrective actions in order to enhance efficiency and impact of the implementation process.
The three most significant results of Work Package 3 can be categorized as follows:
1) Systematic documentation of the implementation of GEAPs in the GenderTime institutions
2) Recommendations for efficient change agency in gender equality projects
3) Guidelines for efficient monitoring of gender equality projects
1) Systematic documentation of the implementation of GEAPs
The results of the monitoring activities illustrate how the GenderTIME project positively influenced the participating institutions in increasing gender equality. Some of the most noticeable changes involved: knowledge and awareness; behaviour; culture; policies; and structures and management. The achievements of Work Package 3, however, extend beyond these project-specific results, and also include results that are of a more abstract and general character. These results fill a gap in existing literature on gender equality change projects and are elaborated in more detail below.
Systematization of the implementation process
The collected information on achievements during the implementation was used to develop a new way of monitoring structural change processes and to shift focus from objectives to processes, i.e. what the teams actually were doing when trying to achieve these objectives. This process perspective simplified and systematized the complexity in the implementation process as it allowed for commonalities within a wide set of activities to appear. It also proved to be user-friendly, illustrative and comprehensive and facilitated a new and improved way of comparing achievements between institutions.
Systematization of challenges and success factors
The monitoring activities contributed to important knowledge on challenges and success factors in organizational change processes. The monitoring tools were constructed in order to identify resistance and challenges and problems along the way, as well as success stories, facilitators and supporting factors. The analysis of the information collected using the monitoring tools contributed to an increased understanding of which factors that motivate academics and practitioners to engage in activities aimed at transforming research institutions into gender equal organizations. The tools thus provided a personal and individual perspective on success factors and challenges, especially resistance. Important results were also the collected accounts on how challenges could be overcome and how resistance could be counteracted.
Systematization of individual and shared reflection
The monitoring tools gathered complex, diverse and detailed information about the progress of the implementation process focussing not only supporting and hindering factors but also detailed accounts of causes for gender inequalities, and how institutional differences influence the implementation process. Work Package 3 systematized the knowledge transfer and provided an arena where accounts and reflections were shared and discussed during workshops and meetings throughout the project.
2) Recommendations for efficient change agency
One of the main contributions of Work Package 3 concerns the production of new knowledge about monitoring methods and monitoring tools. The results illustrate how monitoring activities can contribute to efficient management of structural change projects that aim to improve gender equality within science and technology institutions. The most significant recommendations are listed below.
Recommendation 1: Build a “super team”!
The first recommendation is to build a “super team” of committed change agents. Being alone and perhaps also isolated in an organization is one of the most serious challenges for efficient change agency. The monitoring results point to how important a networking strategy is for change agents. In order to facilitate change it is necessary to build coalitions both within and outside the organization. Organizational leaders and managers are significant actors in change processes and gaining their commitment, involvement and support is essential. However, also collaborations with other organizational actors are recommended, such as administrators and other support staff. Gender equality researchers can be important allies since their expertise and knowledge can be invaluable in understanding e.g. challenges and resistance. But it is likewise important to use an interdisciplinary and inclusive approach and involve people from different fields of expertise. Bridging knowledge gaps through training and knowledge sharing is further suggested as important in order to be able to build these “super teams” and gain the necessary commitment. Finally, in order to guarantee sustainability of a change project succession planning within the “super team” is crucial.
Recommendation 2: Know the organisation and its problem!
The second recommendation emphasizes the importance of having a good knowledge of the organization and of the specific problems and issues at hand. One way of gaining this knowledge is through the above-mentioned “super team” and by involving people who can contribute with valuable information about the organization based on their experiences from different departments and their expertise within different fields. In order to gain this in-depth knowledge about the organization it is also necessary to allocate resources for activities concerning reviewing and assessing the organization. These activities should provide deep and thorough understanding of the existing state of affairs. The monitoring tools used in the GenderTIME project illustrate how this information successfully can be collected through surveys, interviews and focus groups, but also by utilizing already existing systems and procedures and forming coalitions with HR offices and other administrative offices. The monitoring results also highlight problems with lack of organizational transparency, rigid administrative routines and structural complexities. Change agents therefore need to be persistent when developing such coalitions but also understand necessary considerations concerning e.g. confidentiality issues when dealing with data and statistics.
Recommendation 3: Have realistic visions and flexible goals!
The third recommendation emphasizes the importance of using the facts and the data gathered about the status quo to formulate realistic visions about the change process and the goals. These goals should be of a more general and abstract character when the change process first commence, and can become more and more detailed and concrete as more information is gathered about the organization. Reflections about the goals, and discussions about the adjustment of goals, should therefore be allowed throughout the implementation process. The goals should be appropriate and achievable so that resources are used efficiently and not initially in areas where the resistance will be the greatest. Instead, short-term goals can result in short-term wins that are easy to communicate and can be used to build commitment and alliances, overcome resistance, convince gatekeepers, and motivate and increase credibility.
3) Guidelines for monitoring of gender equality projects
Work Package 3 has also developed a number of useful guidelines regarding monitoring that can be adopted to support the systematic structuring of monitoring activities in other organizational change projects. These guidelines are an important outcome of the project and some of the most important are described below.
Guideline 1: Monitoring activities should be an integrated part of the organizational change project
This means that monitoring should be a collaborative effort involving all project members and that it should be a continuous process throughout all the different phases of a project. The systematic and thorough approach to monitoring has been one of the unique and characteristic features of the GenderTIME project, setting it apart from other similar structural change projects. Monitoring activities have been at the core of the GenderTIME project during the whole project lifetime of 4 years. The development of the monitoring tools was the responsibility of the two Work Package 3 leaders but suggestions and requests from the consortium have been taken into account. It has also been of importance for the Work Package 3 leaders to feed back the analyses of the results from the monitoring tools to the GenderTIME consortium. This facilitated a dialogue within the consortium on monitoring, which further improved the monitoring activities.
Guideline 2: Monitoring tools should be flexible, diverse, tailor-made and easy to use
This means that monitoring tools should be adapted to the specific phase in which they are used. They should be developed while taking into account the results from previous monitoring activities Monitoring of the GenderTIME project was performed with a diverse and unique set of monitoring tools adopting a wide range of methods and performance indicators; questionnaires, checklists, interview guides and workshop concepts for team discussions. The development of the tools always started in the continuous analysis and reflection over preceding monitoring tools and the results from them. The three final monitoring tools were for example developed in order to complement previous monitoring tools and provide the implementing GenderTIME partners with monitoring tools of slightly different character. In the final phase of the project monitoring tools were used in order to contribute to a multi-faceted and comprehensive understanding of not only the final reflection phase but also the complete implementation process. It also became apparent that it was important to design monitoring tools that examined the impact of GEAPs relative to different country- and institutional-specific contexts.
Guideline 3: Monitoring should collect different types of information from different groups
This means that monitoring tools should include the direct involvement of both project members and so-called target groups or beneficiaries of project activities. Several of the monitoring tools have offered all GenderTIME team members the possibility to personally and individually reflect on the implementation process and progress in the project during the four years. Instead of focussing on collecting quantitative data these tools have covered the broader picture taking into account the experiences and knowledge gained by the team members directly involved in the work as change agents in their institutions. In addition to this, one of the monitoring tools in the GenderTIME project was used to collect personal change stories from people outside of the GenderTIME project who had participated in project activities and/or belonged to the target groups of these activities. The results highlight the importance of gathering information about the impact of structural change projects on people’s lives and on their working environment. This type of monitoring tool collects rich, qualitative data from change agents and target-groups – necessary for successful structural change projects.
WP4 Knowledge transfer
Objectives and Tasks
WP4 aimed at facilitating and supporting knowledge exchange and knowledge transfer activities about gender equality and gender action plan activities in academia and research. These knowledge transfer activities took place within the core group of project partners (‘consortium’; including so called Transfer Agents; see Thaler 2016), within the participating organisations (universities and research organisations), later also between these organisations, and finally beyond the consortium. The focus of knowledge transfer was not mere dissemination of project results, but moreover producing new and sharing existing knowledge by sharing good practices, learning from experiences from others and transferring knowledge from but also back to GenderTIME.
During the first eighteen months of the project, it was most important to support all partners in setting up the framework for the GenderTIME knowledge transfer, especially by including the Transfer Agents of each organisation in the project logic. Transfer Agents (mostly managers or gender equality officers) have been nominated in each organisation to enhance gender equality sustainably in all participating organisations. All participating Transfer Agents should not only have legitimated power in their institutions and therefore can transfer knowledge from GenderTIME into their organisations, but their position in the respective institutions is independent from the project, thus their work and networking will go on even when GenderTIME has ended. Secondly, GenderTIME brought also gender experts (members of the consortium) as multipliers into play, who transferred specific gender knowledge during on-site and dissemination activities. Additionally, the preparation of didactical concepts for knowledge transfer workshops and organising these events have been crucial to enable optimal learning of Transfer Agents and GenderTIME team members.
During the second eighteen months of the project, the third knowledge transfer workshop aimed at critically reflecting the project activities with invited experts (Ingrid Schacherl, Germany; Heather Laube, USA; Brigitte Ratzer, Austria, GenderTIME advisor); and discussing how gender equality in academia and research can reach more stakeholders on a policy level and how we can transfer existing specific success stories to a general level.
Generally in this project phase, the scope broadened to strategically organise more knowledge transfer possibilities externally (exchanges with ‘sister-projects’, with other institutions, with other scholars and with stakeholders in academia and policy makers) and bring knowledge from outside back to the project as well.
In the final year of the project, organising knowledge transfer activities aimed at other scholars and stakeholders (in academia and policy makers) and testing the GenderTIME toolbox. The main task in this project period was the preparation and organisation of a successful knowledge transfer workshop for stakeholders.
Additional tasks comprised organising feedback for (and improving) the GenderTIME toolbox and discussing a sensible format of “toolbox texting” for the stakeholder workshop (as part of GenderTIME’s final conference in September 2016).
Main results
From the perspective of the work package Knowledge Transfer, three key results can be mentioned as significant highlights of GenderTIME and also interpreted as general recommendations:
1. The successful implementation of Transfer Agents in the respective participating academic and research institutions ensures sustainable gender equality changes beyond project limits.
2. Providing detailed didactical guidelines for organisational learning activities supports the planning and organisation of gender equality knowledge transfer within the project group and in their organisations.
3. By including gender experts and stakeholders strategically in knowledge transfer activities (workshops, publications, etc.) gender equality knowledge can be co-created and thus help overcome the knowledge-to-practice gap.
The first significant result and major success factor of GenderTIME is the invention and implementation of so called Transfer Agents in all participating organisations (see Thaler 2016). These Transfer Agents have been defined as managers and/or gender equality experts from the respective institution, who supported the national project teams in implementing gender equality action plans and will take care of future gender equality issues in their organisations even when the project GenderTIME will be finished.
The framework of GenderTIME, using Transfer Agents proved as advantageous as it offers possibilities to produce sustainable changes within organisations (and with some transfer agents and consortium members also beyond). The following graph visualises the framework used in GenderTIME, using transfer agents, on-site visits and ongoing knowledge transfer activities:
Graph: Framework of GenderTIME (Thaler 2016)
Through sharing of “Knowledge Transfer Activities” by filling and sharing a report template, knowledge transfer activities from all partners have been collected. Comprising reflections of knowledge exchange events within their organisations, during onsite-visits, dissemination events and further multiplying activities, including stakeholder meetings. The analysis (from these reports) of the impact of transfer agents led to valuable insights:
Graph about the dependency of the impact of Transfer Agents (TA) by influence and commitment (Thaler 2016)
One result was that, if Transfer Agents have as well authority (meaning institutional and external influence; for instance a Transfer Agent who is member of the institutions’ management and also part of policy networks), as well as what we call “GenderTIME knowledge” (referring to knowledge about gender equality issues in research and about gender action plans and the commitment to share these ideas and the knowledge), the impact is highest. We assume, the higher both (authority and knowledge/commitment) are, the more stable gender changes in organisations and ideally changes in policies could be. In our cases most transfer agents seem to have a medium or even high influence within their organisation, and all partners are very engaged in knowledge transfer activities beyond their own institutions.
The second important result is connected to the detailed didactical concepts which have been developed and shared (Thaler 2016) for all knowledge transfer workshops and gave additional information. For instance, included were guidelines for introducing the topic of knowledge transfer within GenderTIME to the Transfer Agents, by giving background information on learning organisations and on embedded knowledge. Other topics were enabling GenderTIME internal knowledge exchange (How can we learn from each other? How can we share knowledge on good practices?) preparing visits to other institutions (“on-site visits”) with the aim to take the knowledge exchange on another level. Institutions can learn from other organisations in their country, because they operate within the same legal framework; but they can also learn from on-site visits to other countries, if organisation-cultural aspects are comparable. Through feedback loops (during knowledge transfer workshops) these experiences of knowledge sharing (within the own organisation, within the consortium or with organisations in the same country or beyond) led to individual and organisational know-how, which shaped future knowledge transfer activities.
Importantly, all knowledge transfer workshops (closely prepared and performed with project partners) offered knowledge about the content of gender equality actions as well as about the process (How did we change our organisations towards more gender equality?). During the GenderTIME project, more and more methods used during these knowledge transfer workshops (like small group discussions; world cafè; etc.) have been transferred to other regular project meetings, to present findings and discuss topics, and thus changed the project on a process level too.
A third important outcome can be described as co-production of gender equality knowledge by strategically including gender experts and stakeholders in knowledge transfer activities – which goes beyond the originally planned knowledge transfer.
Additionally to results within the scope of knowledge transfer (like various book and other publications, organised knowledge transfer events etc., which all aimed at transferring GenderTIME knowledge) changing gender practices and gender policies in research and academia sustainably is based on exchanging gender equality knowledge with experts and putting this knowledge into actions with relevant stakeholders in various communities. Therefore two specific highlights of GenderTIME were
1. the “Stakeholders-Workshop about Gender Equality in Research and Academia” where GenderTIME members and experts and stakeholders from all over Europe exchanged and produced knowledge in an interactive setting in September 2016 in Paris; and
2. the joined book publication of University of Wuppertal and IFZ (Dahmen & Thaler 2017), which not only co-produced knowledge within a gender expert community, GenderTIME and its sister projects, but moreover helped co-producing gender equality knowledge with additional actors. Some of these actors have traditional academic gender expertise; others gained gender action experiences on a very practical level. This co-created gender equality knowledge helps reaching a broader community in science and research.
WP5 Independent evaluation
Objectives
The objective of WP5 was to provide a guided evaluation process that covers both the cooperation and collaboration within the consortium and the impact of the goals of GenderTIME:
- the implementation of gender equality measures
- the sustainable implementation of action plans
- the participation and career advancement of women researchers.
The evaluation was aimed at the process of learning, accountability, and impact assessment and guided the project over its whole lifetime. Thus, the process involved all participants at certain stages of the project in order to offer all GenderTIME team members including the Transfer Agents the possibility to personally reflect on the impact of the implementation progress on an individual and on an organizational level. An external team of evaluators, who were not involved in the project otherwise, ensured an unbiased view from the outside. The evaluation was developed as a permanent guidance for the project team in terms of the (working and communication) process and the participating institutions with regard of the impact assessment.
In terms of the impact evaluation we developed different evaluation steps for the participating institutions, of which the core elements are a “Prerequisites Checklist” filled by every implementing institution at the beginning and at the end of the project and secondly regularly structured interviews with Transfer Agents and WP-Leaders. The reason why we rather followed this mixed approach with quantitative data which are enriched by qualitative information, was not only the complex question about organisational change but also the great variability of the participating organisations.
Thus, the achievements of Work Package 5, however, extend beyond these project-specific results, and also include results that are of a more abstract and general character, because these results fill a gap in existing literature on gender equality change projects.
Main results
Implementation of gender equality measures
To better understand the gender equality status quo in the different organizations, the organizational context has to be taken into account: The seven implementing institutions are highly different in size with respect to staff (see table 01): They range from small organizations with 15 employees (IFZ) to medium sized organizations (LOU: 153, Pupin: 421 employees) and to large universities (UNIPD: 2118, UPEC: 2650, BUW: 3081 employees). Furthermore the institutions not only differ in size, but also in their academic background and organizational form.
Table 01: Participating Organizations and Gender Equality Measures
Size of Organizations Academic Background Organizational Form Number of Measures Gender Action Plan
Staff Students 2013 2016
IFZ 15 0 interdisciplinary, ICT small research association (partially university, partially non-university) 11 37 Since 2013
UNIPD 2118 58136 Multiple major university 15 15 Since 2013
UPEC 2650 33000 Multiple major university 40 40 Since 2014
Pupin 421 0 ICT mid-size R&D institution at Belgrade university 23 23 Since 2012
BUW 3081 19000 Multiple major university 11 15 Since 2013
LOU 153 1153 School of Civil and Building Engineering small university 34 36 Since 2013
Tecnalia 1281 172 sustainable develop;
industry &transport; ICT; health; sc.& soc. applied research center 12 12 Since 2014
Although starting from a very high level of gender equality politics in 2013, all seven organizations had different objectives / starting points and motivations to maintain a Gender Action Plan. These differences are due to the national / local law and or institutional differences and contexts.
Pupin, for example, maintains an existing gender action plan since 2012, most of the institutions took the opportunity of this project to build an overall plan since 2013 and two more (Tecnalia and UniPD) started to work on this topic since the beginning of the project.
With regard to these differences within the status, the knowledge exchange through workshops and other group techniques was crucial and successfully triggered by the project team (WP4) by stimulating discussions about the successful implementation.
Thus within the last four years of GenderTIME the participating organizations put a lot of emphasis and development into the sustainable implementation of gender equality measures, but rather didn’t develop new actions, which explains the relative stable numbers of actions reported. There is only two organizations (BUW and IFZ), which significantly increased the number of actions, focussing on the goal of increasing the participation and career advancement of women researchers. They report some new actions regarding the processes of staff development and assessment procedures, cf. table 02.
As to summarize: The Gender Action Plans bring gender issues into different organizational practices and procedures, which were often not handled in a gender-sensitive way before. Asked about organizational practices and the feasibility to implement measures to support the goals of GenderTIME, the organizations report that measures under the umbrella of „work-life balance“ are more easy to handle and more easy to argue with the management, as they are supposed to „gain acceptance because not only targeting women”: All organizations have implemented measures to support work-life balance (cf. table 03).
It seems that due to the project the transfer agents and change agents have been able to connect the gender topic and implementation of gender equality measures to broader management issues, and mapped out a strategy to combine this with existing human resources topics.
Table 03 gives an overview which areas are managed in a gender-sensitive way in the different organizations. The most frequent ones are processes for recruitment (IFZ, UNIPD, Pupin, Tecnalia) and for post-employment communication (IFZ, Pupin).
Table 02: Gender issues related to management processes at the organizations
Gender issues in ... BUW IFZ LOU UNIPD Pupin UPEC Tecnalia
o management processes x x
o staff development programs x
o assessment procedures x
o quality assurance procedures x
o recruitment, retention, tenure & promotion x x x X x
o post-employment communication x x
Procedure for gender discrimination x x x
Reports of gender discrimination / ombudsperson x x x X
Internal gender monitoring x x x x x x
External gender monitoring x
In addition some organizations implemented regular working groups and established new rules such as: the “Hub Committee and Welfare and Communication Committee” at LOU, or the “Gender Equality Monitoring” at PUPIN . Along with the development and maintenance of a new system, which aims at collecting and using gender aggregated data UNIPD was able to build a system of indicators to better understand and monitor GenderEquality . At IFZ the development of a new salary system was seen as a “window of opportunity” to analyse and reflect on gender inequalities.
Others implemented new measures that don`t need lots of extra budget, and therefore will be pursued after the project: Examples are: Lunch meeting at BUW, Peer mentoring groups at IFZ, the Interdisciplinary Master Day at UPEC, or “Gender at Noon” at UPEC.
Table 03: Measures to improve work-life balance
Measures in ... BUW IFZ LOU UNIPD Pupin UPEC Tecnalia
o Timing of departmental meetings
and social gatherings x x x x
o Supporting dual researcher couples x x
o Work/life-balance x x x x
o Part time possibilities x x x x x
o Job flexibility x x x x x x x
• Sustainable implementation of action plans
With regard to the sustainability of these Gender Action Plans, the concept of the transfer agents (GenderTIME) seems to be very promising in terms of the sustainability: Thus, transfer agents overtook more than a symbolic role within the project.
These persons were nominated by each organization who should guarantee the implementation of structural change in their institutions. Although the frame conditions differ from partner institution to partner institution, most Transfer Agents were in a powerful position, where they hold budgets and could overtake decisions in human resources.
The attitude towards GenderTIME was mainly positive at the beginning of the project and showed that the transfer agents are convinced of the advantages of the GenderTIME project: Almost half of the group explained, that GenderTIME is “somehow a really big motor of things to do”. “Thanks to this project, at least, we have in mind the real situation” or “this is a fantastic moment to look into the organization”.
After four years of project work there was even more a positive attitude towards the activities as most of the Transfer Agents see a lot of different ways of impact at the institutions. They stress not only the collaboration with the other institutions, but also the bringing in of examples from other institutions and picking up new things.
Due to the project they gained argumentation power towards the management of their organizations and they have been able to build up a strategy for establishing actions for gender equality.
The project triggered a lot of knowledge exchange and discussions about the status of the organization itself, workshops and stakeholder meetings with delegates from other institutions helped to create a network of knowledge, which is recognized as a big opportunity, not only by the transfer agents itself, but also by other involved persons. All stress that they have been able to gain benefits by having been involved into this project, they were able to build up some very specific knowledge about how to approach the management and about how existing strategies can be connected with the implementation of gender equality action plans. Thus, the knowledge transfer among the partner organizations established already a fruitful network, which was shown at the GenderTIME conference and knowledge transfer workshops.
• the participation and career advancement of women researchers
Knowing that a change process and implementation work will not end after a four years project it is counterproductive to present some statistics that more or less show a status quo. But even in this small period the ambitious work of the participating organizations results in a change and move forward with regard to the percentage of female researchers, students and professors, as the following Figure 01 shows.
Figure 1: Percentage of women at students/researchers and professors
WP6 Methodology for structural change
Role and tasks of UNIPD and UPEC
UPEC and UNIPD teams have had two distinct but complementary roles in the WP. The WP6 started on M18 (mid 2014) with the shared tasks to compare and analyze the different GenderTIME experiences and to confront them to existing methodologies for structural change (UPEC), to develop specific instruments to detect and monitor gender equality (UNIPD) and to provide a general methodology as a “toolkit” available to all institutions (UPEC).
Comparative analysis among GenderTIME action plans
It is important to notice that each partner had designed an action plan independently, according to its needs, before the beginning of the project. This methodological choice implied an inductive approach when comparing and collecting the outcomes of the project. There were no “a priori” common classifications to organize the actions and/or the practices. It was one of the challenges of WP6. Starting the “lesson learnt” from the implementation of the self-tailored action plans in each institutions of the consortium (see WP2 and 3), that is providing some important indications on what to stress (data collection for example), what is more important to achieve (solidarity and favour of the offices and of the institution in general to gender arguments) and what we still lack (resources, permanent and dedicated staff for these type of monitoring and evaluations).
GenderTIME methodology and other similar methodologies
Methodologies to implement, monitor and evaluate actions plans are inspired either by quality insurance management – as Athena Swan for example – and propose grids and assessment sheets which invite the participants to reflect on the process with the help of an external evaluator, the final goal is a certification; or they are inspired by statistical methods, the idea is to collect data and to build indicators, the goal is to improve the numbers. In addition, usual qualitative methodologies for social studies may be used: surveys, interviews, focus groups, to understand the experience of the different stakeholders and the challenges they experience. We want to emphasise what we can learn of the recent projects funded by the EU during FP7 and H2020, and from parallel experiences as ATHENA SWAN and NSF ADVANCE.
In terms of contents, the different GAPs or GEPs (Gender Action Plan or Gender Equality Plan) propose different “measures” or “activities”, basically we find in all projects: a systematic qualitative and quantitative data collection, surveys though questionnaires and interviews, regular reports on the outcomes, events (workshops, mentoring sessions, conferences, courses), changing procedures (e.g. quotas in boards and committees, better transparency and formalised processes etc.), changing regulations (maternity leave, part-time and flexibility, child care, double careers, ... ), promoting gender in the content of research, sharing knowledge, disseminating. GEPs organise all the actions and all the data according domains or topics.
When analysed in detail, the GEPs face some critical issues:
- They are designed to be adapted to many different local contexts in terms of disciplines, size, etc. with various degrees of institutional autonomy.
- Another critical issue is the short time frame. A systemic change is hard and even impossible to measure in 3 to 5 years (average duration of the projects). Numbers are changing very slowly, and there is often no clear outcome to measure beyond self-assessment.
- Relating to this issue, the multi-layered dimensions of the problem and the interactions of the GAP with the overall context are never considered. Regarding gender equality, we do not know what have been the impacts of many factors such as the economic crisis and budget cuttings, the new management of research, etc. (Godfroy, 2016)
GenderTIME Toolbox
During the last period of the project (months 30 to 48), WP6 team has focused the attention on its “core mission”, the implementation of a “toolbox”.
When analysing the methodological tools proposed in GEP and in the existing toolboxes, some common challenges, also faced in GenderTIME, may be identified:
- Access to data, plus issues regarding the retrieving, the cleaning and the confidentiality issues. Lack of harmonised categories to make comparisons, even when categories look similar at first glance. What is a A position? The A position is defined in different ways in the different countries (Le Feuvre 2015).
- Lots of useful data are sometimes available but time consuming to retrieve.
- Lots of interesting data does not exist (on time allocation, on cultural climate, on well-being). The lack of data is supplied by “cultural surveys” or questionnaires.
Tools for monitoring the implementation
The second step in all projects is the monitoring of the implementation of the GEP. Usual solutions (including in GenderTIME) are tables and form to follow-up the implementation. The challenge is to include the multi-dimensional information and comments, when keeping relatively easy to read documents. In addition, as mentioned above, the short time-framework, the interactions with other issues (as budget cutting) and the small numbers (in some cases) do not allow observation of changes in numbers.
UNIPD in charge for building the System of Indicators UNIPD-GEI
UNIPD concentrated its efforts in the building of a system of indicators called UNIPD-GEI with a domain-based structure, inspired by the EIGE_GEI domain-based index on gender equality. Nevertheless, in our specific case, although highly relevant, the EIGE Gender Equality Index shows the limit of addressing countries (which means population and use of macro data), instead of single research institutions (which means dealing with people and with the use of micro data). That’s why the UNIPD team decided to build a new model based on the intersection between that of EIGE model and the one proposed by the “Sister Project” GenisLab, whose aim was to implement a very interesting “gender budgeting” approach in the academic context.
Our proposal followed a hierarchical top-down approach: starting from the general concept, several domains and sub-domains were identified, presenting indicators, the necessary variables and the data collection. Thus, the conceptual model driving the data collection in the UNIPD approach was based on seven domains: work, money, power, health, knowledge, space and time.
In addition, we described the methodology for the computation of the elementary indicators, the indicator that compares women and men and gives the gender gap for each sub-domain. Several other aspects were considered, such as: the direction of the indicator, the normalization, the age standardization, the weighting coefficient for non-responses.
The UNIPD team completely designed the new tool to be used in Academic and Research Institution, having defined the statistical model to calculate the composite indicator starting from the simple indicators relative to each domains/sub-domains. A test on this tool based on an on-line questionnaire was carried out at UNIPD last September and some preliminary results were presented to the Consortium during the meeting in Loughborough (month 36). The conceptual model, the methodology of the Systems of Indicators, the statistical model at the basis of UNIPD-GEI, The text of the online survey and some results were published in the book: S.Badaloni L.Perini (Eds). A model for building a Gender Equality Index for Academic Institutions, Padova University Press http://www.padovauniversitypress.it/publications/9788869380983 All the developments of the research were presented in subsequent meetings of the Consortium in 2016. Finally, the System of indicators and the calculus of the UNIPD-GEI index were presented at the University of Padua on Dec. 7th 2016 in an international meeting in order to share the results and foreground of the Project within our University and some representatives of European Institutions (http://gendertime.dei.unipd.it). Both the on-line questionnaire and the UNIPD-GEI are part of the TOOLBOX implemented by UPEC as a result of the whole efforts made in GenderTIME to try and select the most useful tool and the most successful best practices provided by the partners of the consortium in the last four years.
GenderTIME Toolbox
The basic idea of the toolbox is to make available all the experience gained in the GenderTime project when implementing action plans. It is eventually open to new inputs from other institutions after the end of the project. The toolbox is available at http://www.gendertime.org/Toolbox. The tool was developed by UPEC and UNIPD in collaboration with PUPIN for the technical support.
The structure is based on five parts: 1) Contextual information as legal frameworks, glossary, etc. “What is gender mainstreaming?”, “What is Gender Equality Plan?”, the “Role of Transfer Agents”. 2) The UNIPD-GEI index presented in on an introductory page with a link to download the full information in PDF: “GenderTIME index”. 3) Overall objectives: presentation of tools and methods and good practices by objective 4) Practical tools and methods (templates for surveys, interviews, data collection, evaluation, etc.) out of context 5) Good practices (case studies, success stories, etc. implementation experiences) in context. Part 4 and 5 have common categories to allow browsing among the different parts. Different ways of circulating across the information are proposed to the user, according to his or her needs: 1) By overall objectives: knowledge exchange, collecting and analyzing data, awareness raising and education, staff development, improving working conditions, management and policy-making, evaluation and data monitoring. Each objective is linked to tools and good practices, providing methodological tools and examples in context. 2) By EIGE domains, with subdomains adapted to university and research: work, money, time, knowledge, space, health, power (space has been added by UNIPD). Only good practices are available through this classification, but it is easy to connect this knowledge to the UNIPD-GEI index to get the measurement tools.
Recommendations for measuring gender equality in Structural Change Projects
One of the main contributions of Work Package 6 concerns the production of new knowledge about gender equality measuring systems both from a methodological point of view and a practical one. The tool UNIPD-GEI has been conceived in a very general way to be easily adapted to different Academic and Research Institutions at European level. In a season strongly based on the assessment of scientific production considering only mainly the impact factors of the Journals it should become mandatory to include for each Institution its degree of achieved gender equality. To this aim the Network of Structural Change Projects can constitute an important cross-cutting dissemination network.
Recommendations for future research: we are at the same time drawn in data and lost in terra incognita.
- More data could be collected systematically by institutions (about publications, project funding, research leaves, fellowships, etc). Maybe the definition of common EU norms to describe publications and research projects could be explored.
- Today the focus of GEPs is mostly on STEM, or STEM and HSS, there are very few studies on medicine, law, economy, philosophy, etc..
- Data from PhD and habilitation reports, evaluation reports, recruitment reports, lab reports should be exploited more systematically. We also recommend a better focus on the academic specificities.
- Our Last recommendation is building bridges with related research. First with statistical index to measure gender equality as EIGE, UNIPD has worked a lot in this perspective; second, bibliometrics and scientometrics, academic rankings, ACUMEN project and CTWS in Leiden have paved the way for this approach.
WP7 Dissemination
Introduction
The objectives of Work Package 7 in GenderTIME were: 1) to support the other work packages in spreading information about the project and the implementation activities by establishing and maintaining the GenderTime portal, 2) to enhance fruitful comparisons and interchanges between Institutions by providing e-collaboration tools, and 3) to sustain project activities after the end of the project and at the continuation of the projects results and activities, including responsibilities and intellectual property rights.
The three most significant results of Work Package 7 can be categorized as follows:
4) Establishment, customization and maintenance of the GenderTIME portal;
5) Development of e-collaboration tools including the implementation of the GenderTime Toolbox;
6) Providing support for dissemination activities including the organization of the GenderTIME Conference.
1) Establishment, customization and maintenance of the GenderTime portal
In the very beginning of the project, aimed at promoting project results to external stakeholders, the GenderTIME portal was established by PUPIN using the latest Internet technologies. It consists of two parts: the public part (see rectangles in blue) and private part (see rectangles in red).The public part of the portal presents the GenderTIME project, the accomplished results, the GenderTIME related events (project meetings, conferences, seminars, etc) and the GenderTIME Toolbox. The most updated site on the private part of the portal is the News section (sixty nine news were posted in the last 4 years). The GenderTIME Conference web page, http://www.gendertime.org/Conference was updated according to the conference preparatory activities in the last year of the project. The GenderTIME toolbox materials were linked to the public site of the portal, see http://www.gendertime.org/toolbox/toolbox.htm.
2) Development of e-collaboration tools including the implementation of the GenderTIME Toolbox
The private section of the portal is accessible for registered users only (55 users, members of the GenderTIME consortium including transfer agents) and is used for sharing and exchanging information between the project partners. The private content is classified into 14 categories (e.g. event, forum, meeting, on-site visit, etc). Currently the private space is composed of 77 pages that link to more than 850 attachments (images and/or documents).
Besides the GenderTIME portal, the most convenient way for sharing information inside the consortium is the mailing list consortium@mail.gendertime.org. In order to further support the e-collaboration, analysis and dissemination of the results, PUPIN implemented
• the Culture Staff Survey – Analysis tool, as a collaboration between WP3 (Monitoring) and WP7 (Dissemination);
the GenderTIME Toolbox, as a collaboration between WP6 (Methodology for Structural Change) and WP7 (Dissemination).
Tool for analysis of Culture Staff Survey
GenderTIME ToolBox
3) Providing support for dissemination activities including the organization of the GenderTime Conference
In the very beginning of the project, as part of Work Package 7 activities, a dissemination strategy and detailed action plan for its implementation was defined. Specific objectives were drafted for each year of the project and adequate approaches were proposed e.g. standard instruments, like publicity and promotion materials (leaflets, posters, etc,.), web site, conference and journal papers, but also targeted actions such as organization of meetings and public events with the ˝sister˝ projects such EGERA, STAGES, GENOVATE FESTA, GENIS LAB, INTEGER, STAGES and others, see Related projects. More information about the dissemination activities is provided in Section II (4.2 Use and dissemination of foreground) of the Final Report.
1. 3. 2. Results obtained by partners implementing a Gender Equality Plan
Seven partners implemented a Gender Equality Plan during the 48 months of the project.
IFZ (Austria)
Introduction
IFZ (Inter-University Research Centre for Technology, Work and Culture) is a small-scale research institute (founded 1988) in Austria, which cooperates closely with Klagenfurt University; primarily financed with research fundings. The research unit „Women* – Technology – Environment“ is active in EU-Gender-Projects since 2001, and part of gender studies/modules in Graz and Klagenfurt University. The initial Gender Equality Action Plan for IFZ comprised a monitoring of the career processes (Who makes what kind of career at IFZ?), a reviewing of the salaries (Is the salary scheme at IFZ gender equal and fair?), assessing work ideals (How is work-life-balance at IFZ? How does work-life-balance at IFZ influence career?), improving career support (What do IFZ employees need?) and disseminating good practice (How can knowledge be transferred?).
Main challenges, achievements and reflection
Three challenges had to be met during GenderTIME. First, due to the small size of the organisation for all quantitative (survey) and qualitative (focus groups, interviews, workshops, etc.), the whole staff needed to be motivated to participate; otherwise the significance of the results would have been too low. Second, gender and especially equality had to be positioned as an organisational, not a ‘women’s topic’. Third, the economic crisis led to reduced research fundings and reduction of staff, which resulted in an attitude that the institute faces bigger problems than gender equality right now. None of the three problems is IFZ-specific and so the ways they could have overcome might be of interest for other research organisations too.
The success factors at IFZ were manifold. Whereas one challenge was the small size of the organisation, this helped also to reach the whole staff easily (regular staff meetings; presentation of GenderTIME results, etc.). At one of the first staff meeting a gender report has been presented and the results showed that although gender equality was one of the basic values at funding IFZ, some gender inequalities happened (e.g. concerning part time jobs), because gender equality has not been formally fixed. By introducing GenderTIME with this gap between the initial idea of an gender equal institute and the reality, the willingness of the staff to work together on the gender equality action plan has been high. Another positive influence factor, were the GenderTIME resources to help initiate structural changes. Finally, the Transfer Agents were very committed and used their influence in the organisation to make sustainable system changes at IFZ:
▪ New salary system (incl. recognition of parental leave times)
▪ Gender report with detailed IFZ gender data (presented at staff meeting)
▪ Guidelines for barrier-free and inclusive event organisation
▪ Regular evaluation of work-life-balance and work stress factors
▪ Coaching (based on evaluation results) & peer mentoring group for women
▪ Knowledge transfer activities for students (lectures, seminars), gender networks (conference, meetings), (higher) education organisations (workshops, lectures, panel discussions), and media.
▪ Co-production of gender equality knowledge (book by IFZ and BUW: Dahmen & Thaler 2017)
Significant highlight 1: New salary system
A Transfer Agent and a GenderTIME member were asked by the IFZ management board to join working on organisational change measures. One outcome of these discussions was a new salary and career model that inhibits individual salary negotiations in the course of recruitment and promotion processes (which were the main factors of gender inequalities, although the previous system enjoyed a reputation of being gender fair – until it has been proven otherwise with a gender report). By applying the new model based on objective and transparent criteria a gender gap in salaries can now be avoided. Furthermore, the new salary scheme deals with parental leave like with educational leaves or research stays abroad: they count like normal working times, so salary advancements are not hindered by parental leaves; and parenthood in research at IFZ is not seen as career-hindering, but valued positively.
Significant highlight 2: Book
Anita Thaler (IFZ) and Jennifer Dahmen (BUW) edited a book about “Social Gender Justice in Academia and Research”), which can be seen as a successful co-production of knowledge effort. One half of the book chapters has been written by Austrian and German (plus one US American) gender scholars. The other half included knowledge gained through framework programme activities funded by the European Commission, like GenderTIME (four book chapters by six authors) and three sister projects (INTEGER, STAGES, FESTA, one book chapter each). Through this approach the book serves not only the knowledge transfer to people outside these framework programme projects, but worked as a co-production of knowledge activity between GenderTIME, other sister projects, gender experts and gender equality officers. The focus of the book lies not only in the analysis of gender inequalities and recommending activities theoretically, but explicit aimed at sharing hands-on experiences from implementing gender equality action plans or specific gender equality measures and their evaluation. With this approach, practitioners in academia and research should be motivated to use the book (parts of it) for their gender equality actions in their own organisations.
The book was also already presented by Thaler (IFZ and Dahmen (BUW) in an Austrian gender studies conference in December 2016 and discussed with a very relevant target group of GenderTIME (gender scholars of various disciplines and gender equality officers of Austrian universities and research centres; „Soziale Geschlechter(un)gerechtigkeit in Wissenschaft und Forschung“, presentation of Anita Thaler and Jennifer Dahmen at the 4th annual symposium of the Austrian Society for Gender Research, „UN|GLEICHHEITEN REVISITED. Konzeptionen und Interventionen kritischer Geschlechterforschung“, December 2, 2016, University of Linz, Austria).
University of Padua (Italy)
Introduction
The University of Padua was established in 1222. Today, in 2016, the academic staff counts 2075 professors (of which women are 710), 2275 administrative and technical staff employees (women are 1385) and 57.665 students (women 31.392). The University is divided into 33 departments grouped into 9 schools, representing the second biggest institution in our country.
The first Equal Opportunity Committee was elected in 2002. Since 2013 the equal opportunities issue has been carried out by three different organisms CUG, the Commission for Equal Opportunities and Gender Equality and the Gender Monitoring Lab (the last one created as a GenderTIME positive Action). The first three year Action Plan was released in 2003, the last (the current one) in 2015.
The main objective of the UNIPD team was to monitor and measure Gender Equality in Academia and in Research Institutions, achieved through many different steps as described in the next paragraphs.
UNIPD Action Plans APs
UNIPD entered the project GenderTIME in 2013 with an AP including measures on work/life balance, career paths and fair conditions of work and study, equal representation at decision level, elimination of gender stereotypes and promotion of a culture of equal opportunities. Our objective in GT was to expand the focus of the actions towards some crucial points regarding the career of permanent and non-permanent teaching staff. In order to better achieve these results, we decided to include in the UNIPD GT goals the creation of a permanent organism called Gender Monitoring Lab (Osservatorio di Ateneo per le Pari Opportunità) set in October 2013. Its aim was both the collection, the organization and the analysis of data on the presence of women at any stage of their career path at UNIPD and the monitoring of the “gender in research” issue as well as the gender policies implementation. It is a gender equality organism connected to other Equal Opportunities organisms. Since many data are not available at and usable level, in 2014 we decided to launch a campaign of data retrieval on the Composition of Commissions, Boards, Decision Making bodies, etc from a gender point of view. The campaign was launched again in 2016 to detect possible changes. The existence of this organism, born in the framework of GenderTIME, is central for the sustainability of the implementation of gender equality tools.
In 2015 the University of Padua adopted a new three year Gender Action Plan (Piano di Azioni Positive 2015-2017) in which new keywords such as Gender Budgeting, courses on Gender in Science at PhD level, proposed in framework of GenderTIME Project, were included.
In 2016 we offered a training course on Gender Budgeting to the mid-management Staff of the University. Then a specific Commission was appointed by the Rector in order to elaborate the Gender Budgeting of the University of Padua.
UNIPD tools for monitoring Gender Equality
Methodological analysis in order to develop a system of indicators for measuring Gender Equality in Academia started in 2014 together with the implementation of the first tools developed in the framework of GenderTIME Consortium:
• the Cultural Staff survey to detect the degree of Gender equality awareness of the Academic permanent and not permanent staff (2014)
• the Glass Ceiling Index - GCI to measure the glass ceiling effect in two Departments of our University (STEM and HSS) to be compared the GCI of the partners of the consortium (2015)
In 2016 we elaborated and implemented the UNIPD-GEI system of indicators for measuring Gender Equality in Academia in the framework of the WP6 (started on M18 of the GT project). We developed a domain-based conceptual model to measure GE in Academia, built by integrating EIGE Gender Equality Index approach re-defined for the Academic environment with the approach proposed by one of the FP7 “Sister Project” GenisLab, thus leading to model for collecting data based on seven domains: work, money, knowledge, time, power, health and space. The conceptual model, the methodology of the Systems of Indicators, the statistical model at the basis of UNIPD-GEI, and some preliminary results were published in a book:
S.Badaloni L.Perini (Eds). A model for building a Gender Equality Index for Academic Institutions, Padova University Press ISBN: 97888693809, 2016.
A more detailed description of the present research has been reported in the WP6 report.
At the end of the Project, December 7th 2016, we held a Workshop in Padova titled Gender Equality in Academia to share the results and foreground of the Project within our University and some representatives of European Institutions (http://gendertime.dei.unipd.it)
University of Paris-Est Creteil (France)
The GenderTIME project was implemented at the University of Paris-Est Créteil (UPEC) from January 2013 to December 2016. Monitoring and improving career development and opportunities, creating gender balanced decision bodies, collecting and analysing data on staff and disseminating good practices represent the most important measures implemented during this period. The GenderTIME project at UPEC was implemented at the university as pilot project covering particularly 4 out 12 faculties.
During this period (since 2012), the legal framework has changed in a very positive way regarding gender equality in the academia with the Sauvadet law (2012) and the Fioraso law (2013). Some measures proposed in the GEP have been implemented through laws as measures to have gender-balanced governing boards in universities and gender-balanced recruitment committees. This supporting political context has been a big asset for the success of the GenderTIME action plan. Nonetheless, in the same period, we have also experienced backlash with the activism of some very conservative groups fighting against a supposed “théorie du genre” and denigrating gender studies.
Main GenderTIME objectives at UPEC were changing the organisational culture and raising awareness. To achieve this objective, UPEC team has built two different networks:
- A network of researchers in gender studies, they were involved as experts and advisers for gender policy, they also had the opportunity to share their research, which is very important in an interdisciplinary field as gender studies, and finally they gained a much better visibility for their field. The participation to the network was open on a voluntary basis, a mailing list has been established to share information.
- A network of gender equality officer correspondents. This network was built at institutional level to support the gender equality officer in each faculty. Head of faculties were asked to appoint an “equality correspondent” (“correspondant•e egalité”), the network of correspondents was a transmission belt between the gender equality office and the management of each faculty.
To develop courses and research on gender and equality issues at the University was another action aimed at increasing awareness on gender at the University.
In this direction, two Interdisciplinary Masters Days on gender issues were held in March 2015 and in March 2016 in the context of the International Women's Day and organised in close collaboration with the network of gender studies experts, and with the professors providing gender courses. The purpose of the Days was to allow students to debate in public on the results of their researches before the defence and to explore new avenues. The Days were held in the afternoon, the first one was gathering ten (10) Masters students presenting their thesis, all women and the second one with fifteen (15) presenting students, including three (3) men. Around fifty students attended the day each year. Topics covered were varied, from the occupation of the game spaces by the boys and girls in kindergarten, to the consideration of the video games from a gender perspective, gender in advertisement and marketing, or gender in the history of teachers’ profession. The network support was crucial for the success of the Interdisciplinary Masters Days.
In addition, a list of courses and degrees related to gender issues, a list of professors involved in gender studies, have been published on the website of the gender equality office. The aim was to provide more visibility for gender studies and to facilitate the identification of gender courses.
To promote and develop research on gender and equality issues, seven (7) recent books and research on gender equality written or directed by UPEC staff or students have been presented and discussed via conferences. Focus groups with academic staff to discuss and share their experiences have been officially appointed by six (6) heads of faculty and grouped nine (9) memberships in a network as representative of their institutions. The other purpose of this network was to support the GenderTIME team to implement measures in each faculty as equality correspondents.
To inform on gender issues was another action aimed at increasing awareness on gender at the University and have led the team to create the first Gender office Website with the support of the Department of communication at the beginning of 2015 for disseminating the GenderTIME project results and main information about gender events.
The UPEC social departments are now better informed about the procedures to be followed with how addressing sexual harassment in Higher education, through the spread of the relevant guide, produced by the CPED, ANEF and CLASCHES. Colette Guillopé, UPEC gender equality officer, played a leading role in the production and the publication of this guide.
Gender aware communication has been promoted. The department of communication is aware about the official guide issued by the Haut Conseil à l’Egalité femmes hommes to promote an epicene language in French public communication. The guide is shared to department staff, and has been adopted as a method of communication.
The reviewing and the monitoring of career development and career opportunities of academic staff have been studied through analysis of data collected from the Human resources department. The results have been then compared with the results of the focus group and interviews conducted among eighteen (18) academics (nine women and nine men) to better understand the collected quantitative data. The database provided by the department included all UPEC staff, so, the team took the opportunity to analyse data regarding non-academics also. The index developed by the UNIPD team for academia and science was partly experienced and has been very useful.
The close collaboration carried out with the department of HRM gave opportunity to monitor the UPEC Social Audit in a gender perspective and to include a new Parity and governance chapter.
The dissemination of good practices beyond UPEC has been achieved at the Île-de-France level and at the French national level through two (2) Gender Equality Officers networks, covering about 68 institutions including universities, engineering schools and research organisations in Higher education and research. The UPEC team have worked with one the networks for a couple of years, between June 2014 and September 2016: a guide on the main achievements of the Île-de-France network, and a practical manual dedicated to the new gender officer in higher education and research were published.
One of the main outcomes learned from these experiences is the need to anticipate the other institutions’ or departments’ or colleagues’ expectations and to find points of convergence to work successfully together in a gender perspective. The gender agenda must not be perceived as an extra work or an extra burden, but as better way to advance its/her/his own agenda. The perception of a common agenda is the key to initiate a “snowball effect” and an extension of the initial target population to students, librarian staff and social workers.
Institute Mihajlo Pupin (Serbia))
Introduction
The Institute is the biggest and the oldest R&D Institute in ICT area in the whole SE Europe. It is affiliated to the University of Belgrade, with almost 65% of employees with engineering background, most of them recruited directly from the University through internships/diploma work.
The initial Gender Equality Action Plan (GEP) for PUPIN included evaluation of existing gender equality practice with focus on research and engineering staff, and introduction of new measures by adopting best practice from GenderTIME partner organizations. Some of the objectives of the PUPIN GEP were:
• Improve Employment opportunities for all at the Institutional Level
• Identify the cause of the actual gender distribution
• Improve support mechanism for the young researchers, careers development and networking
• Improve Culture, Communications and Departmental Organization
• Assess Career breaks
• Understanding why women leave engineering
• Disseminating good practice
Both quantitative and qualitative approaches were used to gain a better understanding about the work situation of female and partly also male staff members.
Achievements and Impact of GenderTime at PUPIN
The activities that were initiated in the GenderTIME framework were motivated by the decision that the structural changes that would be achieved through the GenderTIME actions should not reflect negatively on the performance of the PUPIN Institute as a whole. During the implementation of the GenderTIME Action plan the number of women at the management positions, number of awards won by female staff (see Figure), number of promotions of engineers in scientific titles approved by the Ministry of education, science and technological development were increased.
Currently (February 2017), the female share 1) at the company level is 38,4%, 2) among engineering staff is 37,4 %, 3) among PhD staff is 40 % (see Table). PhD MSc (old program) MSc (Bologna)
Engineering staff Overall
(PhD + MSc)
F M F M F M F M
01/2013 35 65 55,1 44,9 34,4 65,6 36,9 63,1
01/2017 40 60 52 48 37,4 62,8 38,4 61,6
University of Wuppertal/Germany
Introduction
The University of Wuppertal (BUW) was founded in 1972 as one of several so-called comprehensive universities in North-Rhine Westfalia. The position of a gender equality officer exists already since 2000. A staff unit for gender and diversity issues attached to the rectorate was established in 2013.
At the time of the conclusion of the GenderTIME project the female ratio at the institution is as follows:
• Female students: 52% of 20.957 persons in total (incl. PhD students)
• Female professors: 24,60% of 252 persons in total
• Female academic staff: 35,4% of 740 persons in total
The initial Gender Equality Action Plan (GEAP) for BUW included, besides the implementation and organisation of new measures, also the evaluation of already existing gender equality actions with focus on a target group analysis. Therefore interviews and focus groups as well as quantitative surveys were realized to gain a better understanding about the work situation of female and partly also male staff members. The areas of action included: Reviewing and monitoring the employment situation, the career possibilities, specific career support for female research staff, improvement and assessment of work-life-balance issues, and dissemination of gender knowledge inside and outside
Achievements and reflection
The initial planning of the institutional GEAP was only the starting point at BUW. After a first assessment of needs new actions were created respectively planned measures re-defined.
The analysis of salary and employment duration of scientific staff members at BUW led to a discussion about gender and precarity, which highlighted that women are over-represented in non-permanent contracts with lower working hours and shorter duration. For identifying this area of inequality lacks in the availability of gender-segregated data had to be overcome, which made own calculations of the national GenderTIME team necessary. The scientific staff council now annually reviews the development of the employment situation and keeps the topic up and present. The results of the quantitative staff survey, which was implemented in all GenderTIME institutions offered insight into the perception and acceptance of gender equality of the academic staff at BUW. Getting nearly one-quarter response rate of staff members for a quantitative survey on gender equality was already regarded as a small success. The survey was especially helpful for gaining a better understanding about certain resisting voices and the current working atmosphere at the university. For instance it became obvious that many persons perceive gender equality as somehow of ‘omnipresent’ topic, although they are not well informed about actual offers and actions of the office for gender equality.
Further in the first year of GenderTIME BUW successfully attained the next and final level of the Research-Oriented Standards on Gender Equality set up by DFG (German Research Association). During the project lifetime a need for exchange and networking between gender scholars at BUW developed. Besides other smaller actions a so-called lunch or brown bag meeting was organized by the GenderTIME team, which was highly appreciated by the participants. Further it helped to enhance the visibility of gender research at the institution. BUW team members put also a lot of effort into networking, exchange and reflecting with other change agents and gender equality practitioners. With doing so they contributed to dissemination and exploitation of BUW-related and general results of GenderTIME. These are just some insights into work, which happened at BUW. Generally a project like GenderTIME can be seen as an impetus for change but the real process is much more long-winded and complicated to tackle, maybe even more at an organisation which already had accomplished a certain grade of equality.
Loughborough University (United Kingdom)
Introduction
The School of Civil and Building Engineering (SCBE), Loughborough University, is one of the UK’s largest self-contained interdisciplinary built environment schools, with 68 academic staff, 26 research staff, 14 laboratory technicians and 24 support staff. The wide-ranging research activities span civil engineering (infrastructure, transport, water and waste management) and the built environment (building energy demand, construction technology and organisation), with the recruitment of new architecture colleagues promising further expansion. The Research Excellence Framework (REF 2014) results revealed:
• Quality - Over 75% of the School’s research was rated as world-leading or internationally excellent
• Impact - 95% of our research was rated as world-leading or internationally excellent for its influence on society, the economy and policy
Through the GenderTIME project we planned to thoroughly investigate gender inequalities in our institutional context and devise tailored activities to counter the challenges that women face in participating and thriving in academic research. To do this we focused on the following objectives: Evaluate existing institutional policies; Identify the ‘leaky pipeline’, causes and counter measures; Improve support for research staff; Review careers development and networking; Improve culture, communications and departmental organization; and Disseminate good practice. The action plan we designed and implemented over the course of the project aimed to meet these objectives. Here is a table of some of the activities carried out by the project team.
Assessment of existing policies and practices Ongoing input into institution’s Research Staff Association Set up and support Hub Committee Set up and support Welfare and Communications Committee Ongoing support of Athena SWAN activities
Staff Surveys in 2014 and 2016 EPSRC fellowships workshop Managing your academic career workshop Leadership for women workshop Seminar celebrating National Women in Engineering Day
International seminar on gender equality in engineering HE Exit Interviews with former members of academic and research staff Focus groups with academics and research staff Career narrative interviews with new academics Workshop with new academics to discuss findings of interviews
We conducted two surveys with all school staff over the course of the project. The first, a benchmarking survey was conducted in 2014. This was repeated in 2016 and allowed the team to pinpoint any changes that may be indicated by the staff responses to these questions. SCBE‘s GenderTime Transfer Agent says – A crucial task was conducting surveys with staff in 2014 and 2016, and qualitative interviews over the course of the project. This provided us with insights into the effectiveness of our policies and practices and their impact over time.
TECNALIA RESEARCH & Innovation Foundation/Spain
Introduction
TECNALIA is the 1st applied research Centre in Spain and one of the most important in Europe. It was established in 2010 as the result of the merging of 8 different organisations from the Basque Country (Spain).At the beginning of the project female total staff represented the 42,21%, female researchers the 38,51% and 38,34% of PhD (January 2013) but there were important vertical and horizontal segregations. First steps towards cultural and organizational integration started in this new organization through GenderTIME project.
The initial Gender Equality Action Plan intended to:
• Carry out an in-deep analysis of the gender and diversity issues.
• Design and implement a new tailored action plan with measurable actions towards equal opportunities for employees.
• Create the preconditions for structural change.
Action Plan (TAP) was built from a diagnosis of the situation regarding gender starting from the establishment of a diversity and gender policy. Awareness and dissemination activities (internal and external) related with gender issues were also considered. TAP also covered the review of employment policies and procedures, the analysis of the career progression and the equal pay of research staff. Existing work-life balance measures (flexible time-table, tele-working, additional holidays), were analysed and promoted from the gender perspective.
During the project lifetime quantitative surveys were conducted to gain a better understanding about the work situation of female researchers. The high response rate obtained let us to think that this is a relevant issue in the organisation. The survey examined the experiences and perceptions of the working environment, among research staff and the objectives were to determine the forms of intervention and target actions to promote transformational change to ensure gender equality. This was a good starting point for the action plan implementation. The monitoring tools (developed in WP3)– questionnaires, checklists, interview guides, guidelines for small team discussions etc. also helped involving target groups in the monitoring process.
In these years, the project has contributed towards a better reflection on the impact of gender equity measures at institutional level and the identification of structural factors that hinder or support gender equality at the organisation. In this regard, the adoption of work-life balance measures had high impact (flexible time-table, tele-working, additional holidays buying i.e) together with the establishment of permanent participatory structures for reflection. Though the implementation of actions the percentage of female researchers, showed a change and move towards greater equality. On the other hand, monitoring and evaluation mechanisms were difficult to implement, as well the targeted transformation of mind-sets and the institutional culture.
Nowadays there is an on-going reflection in place related to the sustainability of the implemented actions with a special focus on giving a step forward understanding the causes of the segregation and identifying systemic barriers. This will be materialized through a new Gender Equality Plan including new actions and indicators the will be implemented in TECNALIA. The plan will incorporate the results and conclusions of the GenderTIME project. A task force has been created with the aim of monitoring the governing bodies (rules and processes of access) and to identify barriers to achieve a balance (26% of the management positions are female). Other actions will be the definition of measures to identify and reduce barriers related to gender and access to governance.
Working closely with the other partners, engaged in extensive and targeted dissemination activities throughout the lifespan of the project and also inspired good practices to be implemented in TECNALIA and enhanced knowledge exchange.
Potential Impact:
1.4 The potential impacts
There are presented here the potential impacts of the results obtained by the project GenderTIME.
- potential impacts by Work Packages
- potential impacts by partners implementing a Gender Equality Plan
1.4.1. Potential impacts by Workpackages
WP2 Implementation process management
WP2 contributed to:
➢ Create organizational and structural change to transform institutional practices through the implementation of real action plans to support gender diversity and equal opportunities between women and men.
Structural change in universities and research institutions means making them more gender aware. This has important implications for equal opportunities, scientific careers and quality of research. Promoting structural change in GenderTIME institutions implied a step forward removing obstacles to womens´professional careers.
Reviews of organizational processes such as recruitment, performance evaluation, and advancement are likely to identify ways in which structural change would result in achieving organizational goals.
WP2 focused upon the development and implementation of the action plans within a common conceptual framework. The implementation of action plans on recruitment, retention and promotion policies, supporting work life balance measures, updated management and research standards, and supporting policies for dual careers couple, etc. supported by WP2 helped to this objective.
Through the combination of and close cooperation of WP2 and WP3 (Monitoring) the project contributed towards a better reflection on the impact of gender equity measures on an institutional level and the identification of structural factors that hinder or support gender equality in scientific organisations.
➢ Increase of participation and career advancement in institutions.
Though the implementation of actions the percentage of female researchers, students and professors within the participating organizations showed a change and move towards greater equality. (Task 5.13 Final Report about cooperation evaluation and impact evaluation of the implementation and the knowledge transfer of GenderTIME– finalized, Dec. 2016).
➢ Ensure the continuation of implemented activities through the Transfer Agent figure and created permanent structures.
The sustainability of dedicated gender equality structures at institutional level is important. Ensuring the sustainability related to gender equality can be challenging.
The concept of the transfer agents’ in GenderTIME is linked to the actions sustainability. These persons were nominated by each organization who should guarantee the implementation of structural change in their institutions. They are in charge of knowledge transfer and are devoted to the change process and they supported sustainable implementation within their organizations after the project.
➢ Identify good practice examples and case studies.
GenderTIME also stimulated the reflective learning processes among the beneficiaries and the organizations involved. In WP2 the institutional pairing exercise took advantage of the differences between institutions and research teams’ strengths by promoting a closer relationship and providing a framework for collaborative knowledge sharing. The compilation of success stories in partner institutions collected in D2.3 highlights in a qualitative way the main achievements since the beginning of the project and gave the partners the chance to tell the story of the action plan implementation including the highlighting of successes and difficulties.
WP 3 Monitoring
The potential impacts of WP 3 on institutional practices and culture in European research and scientific decision-making bodies primarily concern three key aspects of organizational, structural and cultural change: 1) monitoring activities; 2) synergy building, and, 3) change agents.
1) Impact: monitoring activities in structural change projects
The results from WP 3 can potentially impact the quality and success of monitoring activities in future structural change projects. When monitoring activities are developed in these projects they need to fully utilize the unique experiences and extensive knowledge gained during four years of intense monitoring work in WP 3. The monitoring tools and the monitoring methods developed in WP 3 have been tailor-made to fit the GenderTIME project but they may easily be transferred and adapted into the context of other projects, even those whose focus lies not on gender equality. The 12 monitoring tools developed within WP 3 therefore constitute useful resources for practitioners, gender equality experts and researchers.
2) Impact: synergy building in structural change projects
The results from WP 3 can potentially impact the quality and success of future structural change projects if these projects adopt monitoring tools that facilitate capacity and synergy building. The monitoring tools developed in WP 3 allowed change agents to share, reflect and discuss experiences concerning similar challenges, hindering factors and structural barriers, which often appear in all organisational settings. The monitoring tools thus created arenas for knowledge exchange, peer consultation and mutual support. These arenas were organized in each implementing GenderTIME partner institution separately but also on a consortium level through workshops during GenderTIME project meetings. The result is a dynamic and constructive environment where innovative solutions to problems appeared.
3) Impact: change agents in structural change projects
The results of WP 3 can potentially impact the position of change agents in structural change projects if they acknowledge how precarious working situations for change agents can negatively affect the outcome of such projects. A precarious situation can restrict the powers and authority of the change agents and threaten the legitimacy of the project and potentially endanger the whole project. The results from WP 3 illustrate the need for institutionalisation processes concerning gender equality work, e.g. through ensuring permanent, fully funded, positions for change agents. The status of gender studies also needs to be strengthened through academic professionalization processes that can legitimate this type of (action) research and increase the prestige of this field. Only then can structural change project be truly successful.
Main dissemination activities
Background, approach, progress and results of WP 3 have been continuously disseminated throughout the project lifetime. Both WP 3 leaders presented their work on European and international conferences to interested stakeholders and target groups. The feedback of the audience supported the critical reflection of the work undertaken and encouraged the WP 3 leaders at the same time to pursue their approach due to the positive comments on their work. To support the exploitation of the results, a selection of the most significant monitoring tools developed in WP 3 has further been made public in the GenderTime toolbox, prepared by WP 6. Further, WP 3 has also developed a number of useful guidelines and recommendations regarding monitoring, including a handbook, that can be adopted to support the systematic structuring of monitoring activities in other organizational change projects.
WP 4 Knowledge Transfer
The impact of GenderTIME’s Knowledge Transfer is closely connected to its activities aiming at sustainability:
1. Establishing powerful allies in all participating academic and research organisations: Transfer Agents.
2. Sharing didactical guidelines for organisational gender equality learning activities for academia and research.
3. Co-producing gender equality knowledge with gender experts and stakeholders to overcome the knowledge-to-practice gap.
1. Establishing powerful allies in all participating academic and research organisations: Transfer Agents.
By including Transfer Agents (managers and/or gender equality experts from all participating institutions), the national project teams had powerful support for implementing gender equality action plans and moreover they will take care of future gender equality issues in their organisations even when the project GenderTIME will be finished. Transfer Agents have authority within their organisation and are part of science policy networks, so they have expected impact on more stable gender equality changes in their organisations and ideally changes in science policies as well. Within the GenderTIME project period, positive results from Transfer Agents have been reported on organisational levels (see the impact reports of all participating partners), and on regional as well as national levels (several networking activities have taken place; new networks established; contacts to science policy makers used for gender equality issues).
2. Sharing didactical guidelines for organisational gender equality learning activities for academia and research.
By publishing detailed didactical concepts (Thaler 2016; GenderTIME toolbox) for all knowledge transfer workshops and additional information on learning organisations, embedded knowledge, enabling internal knowledge exchange (How can we learn from each other? How can we share knowledge on good practices?) preparing visits to other institutions (“on-site visits”) and organising feedback loops (during knowledge transfer workshops) these project experiences of gender equality knowledge sharing have potential impact to support other organisations too.
One impact could be seen during the GenderTIME project, as more and more knowledge transfer methods described in the guidelines (like small group discussions; world cafè; etc.) have been used in regular project meetings, and thus changed the quality of the project on a process level.
3. Co-producing gender equality knowledge with gender experts and stakeholders to overcome the knowledge-to-practice gap.
A third and – generally speaking – very important impact is to overcome the knowledge-to-practice-gap by co-producing gender equality knowledge with gender experts, practitioners and stakeholders outside the consortium. The knowledge-to-practice-gap can be seen as one reason for the lack of implementation of scientific knowledge into policies and actions (Karner et al.). By including relevant stakeholders in knowledge exchange (or better knowledge co-creation) activities, the need to translate scientific outcomes into practical and usable terms and dealing with resistance can be minimised, as these are included in the co-production process already. One example is the GenderTIME book (Dahmen & Thaler 2017) for German speaking countries, with their specific legal and cultural context (for instance the special role of “außeruniversitäre Forschung”, research centres outside classical academic/university institutions). One half of the book chapters has been written by gender scholars. The other half transfers knowledge gained through framework programme activities funded by the European Commission, like GenderTime (four book chapters) and three sister projects (INTEGER, STAGES, FESTA,).
References
Dahmen, Jennifer & Thaler, Anita (eds., 2017). Soziale Geschlechtergerechtigkeit in Wissenschaft und Forschung [Social Gender Justice in Science and Research]. Barbara Budrich Verlag.
Karner, Sandra, Thaler, Anita & Wicher, Magdalena (2017). Wie durch gemeinsame Wissensproduktion in der Gender-Forschung soziale Geschlechtergerechtigkeit in Wissenschaft und Forschung befördert werden kann. [How co-production of gender knowledge can lead to more social gender justice in academia and research]. In: Dahmen, Jennifer & Thaler, Anita (eds.). Soziale Geschlechtergerechtigkeit in Wissenschaft und Forschung. Barbara Budrich Verlag.
Thaler, Anita (2016). Learning Organisations in Science and Research: The Role of Transfer Agents in Gender Equality Change Processes. Graz: IFZ Eigenverlag. Download: http://www.ifz.at/eng/Media/Dateien/Downloads-IFZ/Publikationen/Learning-Organisations-Transfer-Agents_Thaler-2016 [15.7.2016]
WP6 Methology for structural change
The potential impacts of WP6 concern mainly the synergic exchange of knowledge and practical experience in the framework of the Structural Change Projects in order to build a cross-cutting view on some key aspects: 1) comparing self-tailored action plans; 2) monitoring, measuring and evaluating change; 3) making change sustainable in a shared way.
In particular the results of WP6 can potentially impact the process of monitoring, measuring and evaluating change in Academic Institutions by means of the System of Indicators UNIPD-GEI and the GenderTIME Toolbox.
The System of Indicators UNIPD-GEI to measure gender equality in structural change projects
One result of WP6 is the definition of a new specific set of gender indicators to be used in Research and Academic Institutions. The idea was that to have an instrument for measuring the degree of implementation of gender policies in Academia at different times The Gender Equality Index UNIPD-GEI is a synthetic indicator obtained when individual indicators are compiled into a single measure on the basis of a multidimensional concept. It can constitute a useful instrument of comparison among Universities and Research Centers, both in Italy and in Europe. The System of Indicators developed at the University of Padua has been conceived to be used in very general way. So, it can be easily transferred and adapted into the context of other projects, even those whose focus lies not on gender equality. Not only: the system of indicators can identifies critical situations from a gender point of view.
The GenderTIME toolbox to monitor and to measure gender equality
The GenderTIME toolbox includes the UNIPD-GEI index and proposes in addition tools and methods out of context and good practices in context. The added value of this box is the ability to link the different tools and examples across objectives or topics to cope with the gaps and the heterogeneity in data collection. The use of a tool can be related to good practices in context and to measurement through the UNIPD-GEI index. The combination of different methodological approaches in a single toolbox, with on-field experiments and statistical approach completed by possible surveys provides a very comprehensive toolbox. This toolbox could be updated and open to new contents after the end of the project, it could also be part of a “toolbox of toolboxes” to be designed in the future.
Main dissemination activities
- FP7 STAGES Project - Gender and science. Advancements and resistances in fighting structural inequality”, Second session Dialogue on structural change «café scientifique», Brussels, March 25th, 2013
- TRIGGER Project - Second meeting among structural change projects, London, April 15th, 2016
- 4S Meeting 2015 in Denver, with a specific session on methodologies to measure structural change.
- 4S Meeting 2016 in Barcelona to present the main outcomes of WP 6.
- GEHE 2016 Conference in Paris
- Workshop Stakeholder, Paris 2016 ...
WP7 Dissemination
The potential impacts of WP 7 on gender related practices and culture in European research and scientific institutions are: 1) raising awareness of gender issues in scientific researcher careers; and, 2) sustainability and synergy building in structural change projects.
1) Impact: raising awareness of gender issues in scientific researcher careers
Through its ICT activities within WP7 (implementing the GenderTIME portal, http://www.gendertime.org/ and other e-collaboration tools), GenderTIME project enhanced knowledge exchange and established fruitful comparisons and interchanges between Institutions with different levels of gender-aware approaches and policies.
Through the Dissemination activities in the last four years (organizing events and participating at events, see Section II (4.2 Use and dissemination of foreground) adapted to different publics in the different European regions by core consortium members and /or by appointed experts (Transfer Agents), GenderTIME reached hundreds representatives of the research community, Gender equality officers in universities, research organisations and engineering schools and other stakeholders.
2) Sustainability and synergy building in structural change projects
GenderTIME consortium partners decided to keep alive the GenderTIME portal (at its present state) for ten years after the end of the project. The main results in a form of guidelines (tools) for implementing and monitoring structural changes (see http://www.gendertime.org/toolbox/toolbox.htm) are available online and could be integrated with other similar tools on EU level thus creating potential impact on the quality and success of future structural change projects.
GenderTIME consortium partners maintained and will continue to use the GenderTIME Twitter account (https://twitter.com/GenderTime). The account has 174 followers (status February 2017) including the ˝sister˝ projects and other projects (e.g. @festaproject @GarciaProjectEU, @genovatecafe, @INTEGERProject, @GENERA_H2020, @gendernet, Plotina Project EU, GEDII Project, TRIGGER at Birkbeck, HEIRRI project, @EQUALISTproject @WomenTechReligion, RRI-PRACTICE project) and international and national networks (e.g. @epws , European Women Rectors Association-EWORA, Irish Social Sciences Platform, STEM Gender Equality Congress, @GendernewsSE, @libra_science, Genus.se @FemmesSciences, @WomenInSTEM_fr).
GenderTIME Twitter account
1.4.2. Potential impacts expected by partners implementing a Gender Equality Plan
IFZ (Austria)
To start with easier actions (like peer mentoring groups) and improving already existing measures (like a gender report) helped building trust for GenderTIME at IFZ. Also teaming up with committed Transfer Agents (TA) who have influence, was key to gain impact. The experience at IFZ showed that the TA can learn gender equality knowledge, but it is very relevant to have a TA with high commitment and influence within the organisation. Finally by using legal requirements (like the necessity for work evaluation) and windows of opportunities (like salary scheme change), IFZ could – with GenderTIME resources and committed TAs implement sustainable changes for gender equality. The regular evaluation of working conditions at IFZ (including work-life balance), the continuous presentation of gender reports in staff meetings, the women’s peer group, and the new salary scheme have been successfully and formally implemented.
Finally, GenderTIME has be seen as a positive system changing project by the staff members as the communication about the project has been very transparent and the monitoring and evaluation activities had been used to get feedback from various staff (and not only GenderTIME project) members.
University of Padua (Italy)
The potential impacts of the GenderTIME project at the University of Padua deal mainly with two aspects:
1) Gender Budgeting
Data collection on the presence of women at any stage of their career path at UNIPD is already an ongoing process in the framework of the Gender Monitoring Lab (Osservatorio di Ateneo per le Pari Opportunità) built at the beginning of the GenderTIME Project and now belongs permanently to our University in an aware way.
In this context, a more advanced project, started in 2016, consists in the definition and the implementation of Gender Budgeting. The adoption of a Gender Budgeting allows to analyze and evaluate how the allocation of resources in an organization, which acts in an apparently "neutral" way, actually produces different effects on men and women. It also involves the integration of a gender perspective in the definition of priorities and strategies, and can impact on the promotion of equal opportunities and the development of human resources as application of the principle of gender mainstreaming in the budgetary process. According to the European Parliament resolution on Gender Budgeting of 3 July 2003, the GB is a way to assess the gender impact on budgetary policies. After a training course on Gender Budgeting that we offered to the mid-management Staff of the University of Padua, a specific Commission was appointed by the Rector in order to elaborate the Gender Budgeting of the University of Padua in the present year. Gender Budgeting is a keyword shared at European level as reported in the GARCIA Working Paper n 14 titled The Gender Budgeting in Academia – toolkit. Moreover, at Italian level, there is a network of many Universities involved in the development of GB, and in some cases it has been already calculated (e.g. University of Naples Federico II, University of Ferrara, University of Bologna, University of Pisa). The Conference of Italian University Rectors has recently taken a strong commitment to achieve this objective in Italy.
2) Gender Culture Dissemination
The critical mass connected to the Structural Change EU Projects like GenderTIME has surely induced a process of general transformation due to the fact that a lot of European Academic Institutions have adopted gender policies for supporting women in their careers promoting Women in Science and Technology. But effective changes happen slowly and are difficult to tackle. One main point is that relevant changes for women in Science can take place starting from a consciousness of gender: the double membership in profession and gender of a women scientist has the potential to shape and disseminate such a consciousness. Then it is crucial to disseminate such a culture through corses, seminars, workshops. Gender Equality has to fight discriminations based on stereotypes because stereotypes are stronger than any laws and policies.
The UNIPD team of GenderTime has dedicated a lot of energy and effort on this issue organizing courses on Gender in Science at First-cycle degree courses and at PhD Schools.
University of Paris-Est Créteil (France)
GenderTIME project has implemented six main good practices. The practices have been tested at UPEC and have been shared during two years with eight other universities in the Paris area. A network at regional level has been set up by ECEPIE to create a multiplying effect and a place to share knowledge.
The following good practices have been experienced at UPEC and shared with the partners of the network: 1- three indicators used by the UPEC team in order to monitor the changes in researchers numbers regarding gender issues, including the Glass Ceiling Index for science and academia ; 2 - the purposes and conditions for creating and managing the “Gender correspondents” network to help for the implementation of the gender measures in each faculty; 3 - the gender studies experts network; 4 - the purposes and the organization of the “Interdisciplinary Gender and Master day” to promote gender studies; 5 - the purposes and the organization of “Gender at Noon” meetings to promote recent books on gender and give a better visibility to gender studies; 6 - the rule of equality established by UPEC to achieve gender-balanced recruitment committees and gender balanced governing boards, according to the French law.
The network members are representative of four universities including UPEC, one engineering school, two research institutes and one community of nineteen institutions in higher education and research, gathering in total at latest 142,800 students (including PhD students) and more than 34,000 researchers. The multiplying effect has been considerable. In their role as Gender equality officers enforced by law, the network members are an important vector of change towards gender and may influence their institutions.
Furthermore, the experiences learnt from GenderTIME has been shared within the Gender equality officers’ association (CPED) at national level, gathering today sixty-eight French Higher education and research institutions.
Concerning the potential impacts at UPEC, a new UPEC Gender equality officer (GEO), Dr. Lolita Ruben, has been appointed at the end of Pr. Colette Guillopé’s term. The measures initiated by the GenderTIME team will be, as far as possible, carried on after the end of GenderTIME. The new GEO plans to include the administrative staff and students as additional target population. The expected impacts would be to address the remaining six out of twelve (6/12) faculties not covered by the project. In total, the twelve faculties comprise 31 research labs, 33,000 students, 1050 non-academics, 1600 academics (women academics: 47%).
The GenderTIME measures and results at UPEC had been disseminated through fourteen (14) conferences, eighteen (18) general press and website articles, four (4) workshops, two (2) publications, two (2) exhibitions, two (2) posters and one (1) interview.
Institute Mihajlo Pupin (Serbia)
Three most significant achievements and impacts are related to 1) improved management of the scientific staff including employees’ qualifications and competencies, publications / patents / licenses, engagement in scientific communities, etc.; 2) raised awareness about GE topics that has high impact on female researchers and their ambitions in scientific and professional career; 3) extending the standard practice and monitoring approaches in the PUPIN Human Resources Department that will sustain after the end of the project.
University of Wuppertal (Germany)
Communication is a key for bringing the topic of a gender equal organisation forward, which also means that possible change agents or persons, who want to work on gender equality issues should not underestimated the time needed or organizing and implementing. Above certain persistence is necessary since organisations are usually not the fastest when it comes to changing structures. Therefore inclusion of people who are committed to the topic of gender equality and who know the institution well is indispensable. It is equally important to acknowledge also short-term wins and successes, which for instance focus on supporting a certain group of staff members. Third party funding clearly increases the visibility and recognition of gender equality as issue and gives the persons involved some kind of legitimacy to put the finger on existing inequalities which are likely to be overseen in the everyday work life.
TECNALIA RESEARCH & Innovation Foundation (Spain)
The most significant achievements and impacts are related to:
• Awareness and bringing the topic of a gender equal organisation forward.
Communication has been key factor to bring the topic of gender to the institutional culture.
• Engagement of decision-makers
It has been absolutely crucial that the persons in management were personally involved in the formulation of the institution’s gender policy and fully support the introduction, sustainable effect and the monitoring of the gender policy.
The concept of the transfer agents’ in GenderTIME is linked to the engagement of decision makers and actions sustainability. Transfer Agents are in charge of knowledge transfer and are devoted to the change process and they supported sustainable implementation within the organization.
• Improvement of Organisational Structures
At Institutional level, several permanent implementation teams and working groups have been created, including a committee called “open space”. These reflective exercises followed participatory approaches (e.g. through workshops and seminars).
• Career progression:
-Definition and deployment of the professional profile within the 2 careers paths defined (management vs. research).
- Developing a plan to increase female recruitment.
-Assessment on the obstacles to entry points for female recruitment.
-Support the revision of job descriptions and selection criteria to ensure non-discrimination
Loughborough University (United Kingdom)
The most significant achievements and impacts are related to moves towards greater gender equality in the quantitative data, a qualitative improvement in the experiences of staff over the time period of the project, and project sustainability and legacy.
Quantitative impact
Over a twelve month period six female researchers from the School have moved onto lectureships: There is an increase in the success of female ECRs in securing permanent academic appointments.
In 2016, women now represent 21% of staff, just above the national figure of 20% (HESA data) and the proportion of women Lecturers increased to 30% over the duration of the project (Table 1).
Table 1: Academic positions split by gender and F%
2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016
Position F M F% F M F% F M F% F M F% F M F% F M F%
Lecturer 5 22 19% 5 20 20% 4 17 19% 3 15 17% 3 15 17% 6 14 30%
Senior Lecturer 2 13 13% 2 17 11% 2 21 9% 4 22 15% 4 23 15% 4 20 17%
Reader 0 1 0% 0 1 0% 0 0 0% 0 0 0% 0 0 0% 1 1 50%
Professor 2 21 9% 2 20 9% 3 22 12% 3 22 12% 3 20 13% 3 19 14%
Total 9 57 14% 9 58 13% 9 60 13% 10 59 14% 10 58 15% 14 54 21%
Qualitative impact
The GenderTIME staff surveys conducted in 2014 and 2016 evidence perceptions of an improvement in useful networking opportunities and a large increase in understanding why the School takes action to encourage underrepresented groups to apply for posts, with increasing support for actions to tackle gender inequalities.
On an organisational level the project impacted on the school’s focus on gender as a topic, in particular through the support of activities in relation to Athena SWAN. SCBE completed a submission for an Athena SWAN departmental award to the Equality Challenge Unit, and the decision will be published later in 2017.
Sustainability
To improve the culture, communications and departmental organisation two new committees were established and will continue to be active once the project has ended. The Hub Committee is made up of and represents research staff and PhD students in the school and is centred on the working environment. The committee has held regular professional development seminars and social events. The Welfare and Communication Committee is made up of representatives from a range of staff groups and students in the school. One of the key aims of the committee is to promote gender equality.
The purpose of these committees is to encourage better information flow across all members of the school and to support initiatives that develop an inclusive working environment. Both committees are fully established in the School structure and will continue beyond the duration of the GenderTIME project. The consolidation of the GenderTIME project with SCBE’s commitment to the Athena SWAN agenda at School and Institution level has resulted in a mutually beneficial relationship between project and organisational objectives.
List of Websites:
1.5. Public Website and contacts
Public Website address : www.gendertime.org
Relevant contacts: Dr Yvonne Pourrat, Coordinator, ECEPIE, France
yvonne.pourrat@ecepie.fr
Dr Valentina Janev, Dissemination, web site administrator, Institute M. PUPIN (Serbia)
valentina.Janev@institutepupin.com
Main contacts by team:
ADDRESS GENDER TIME 2017
N° Partner Homepage Name email address
1 ECEPIE http://ecepie.fr/ Yvonne Pourrat yvonne.pourrat@ecepie.fr
André Béraud andre.beraud@ecepie.fr
2 IFZ http://www.ifz.at/ Anita Thaler anita.thaler@aau.at
Sandra Karner sandra.karner@aau.at
3 UNIPD http://www.gendertime.org/unipd Silvana Badaloni silvana.badaloni@unipd.it
Lorenza Perini lorenza.perini@unipd.it
4 UGOT http://www.gu.se/ Helen Peterson helen.peterson@gu.se
5 UPEC http://www.en.u-pec.fr/ Anne-Sophie Godfroy anne-sophie.godfroy@u-pec.fr
Bodo Clavreul bo.clavreul@gmail.com
6 PUPIN http://www.pupin.rs/ Sanja Vranes sanja.vranes@institutepupin.com
Valentina Janev valentina.janev@pupin.rs
7 BUW Jennifer Dahmen jdahmen@uni-wuppertal.de
8 LoU http://www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/civil-building/ Tarek Hassan T.Hassan@Lboro.ac.uk
Sarah Barnard S.H.Barnard@lboro.ac.uk
Andrew Dainty a.r.j.dainty@lboro.ac.uk
9 TECNALIA http://www.tecnalia.com/en/ Ezekiela Arrizabalaga ezekiela.arrizabalaga@tecnalia.com
Lucia Polo lucia.polo@tecnalia.com
10 DUK http://www.gendertime.org/DUK Karin Siebenhandl karin.siebenhandl@donau-uni.ac.at
• Project Logo: Download from http://www.gendertime.org/sites/default/files/GT%20logo_1.pdf#overlay-context=node/28
• Evidence of Dissemination activities:
o http://www.gendertime.org/Results
o http://www.gendertime.org/news
o http://www.gendertime.org/Stakeholders%E2%80%90Workshop
List of Beneficiaries: http://www.gendertime.org/sites/default/files/GENDER_TIME_2017_Contact_Details_of_beneficiaries.xls