G-VERSITY - Achieving Gender Diversity

Project Information

G-VERSITY

Grant agreement ID: 953326

DOI

10.3030/953326

Project closed

EC signature date 7 September 2020

Start date 1 October 2020

End date 30 September 2024

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions

Total cost

€ 4 106 266,48

EU contribution

€ 4 106 266,48

Coordinated by

UNIVERSITAET BERN
Switzerland

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - G-VERSITY (G-VERSITY - Achieving Gender Diversity)

Reporting period: 2022-10-01 to 2024-09-30

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

The European Commission and the United Nations have committed to the sustainable development goal of achieving gender equality in education, political participation, and economic empowerment by 2030. To achieve this challenging goal, it is necessary to increase the representation of women and men as well as of sexual and gender minority groups (SGM) in several professions and positions. These include women in leadership positions, men in healthcare, early education, and domestic (HEED) careers, and SGM groups in areas where employers want a more representative workforce.
To achieve gender diversity, private and public employers need researcher-trained employees who can make choices based on state-of-the-art theories, principles, and up-to-date methods to bring about more gender-equal policies and programmes of employment in Europe. The overarching objective of the European Training Network G-VERSITY was to provide high-level training in the emerging field of interdisciplinary gender diversity research to a new generation of researchers.
G-VERSITY equipped 15 early stage researchers (ESRs) with the skills necessary for thriving careers in the private, public, and non-profit sectors, so that they are better qualified to develop and implement interventions to achieve a more balanced representation of women and men as well as of SGM groups in professions and positions in which these groups historically have been underrepresented. G-VERSITY established a unique combination of hands-on research training, non-academic secondments and courses, and workshops on scientific and transferable skills facilitated by the academic-non-academic composition of the consortium.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

G-VERSITY started successfully in October 2020; the Kick-off meeting, in combination with the first workshop on “Fundamentals of Gender Diversity Research”, was held online due to the COVID-19 pandemic in April 2021; the first summer school took place took place in September 2021 (Berlin, Germany), the second workshop in April 2022 (Venice, Italy), and the second summer school in September 2022 (Berlin, Germany).
The ESRs started successfully with their individual research projects. The set-up of their research projects included literature reviews on each of the different topics, the identification of research gaps in the literature, the further development of their research questions to fill those gaps, and the designing of studies to answer their research questions. Several collaborations between the PhD students have already been established. The ESRs participated actively in the weekly training program—the Journal Club, which is part of the G-VERSITY E-learning tool — through which they became familiar with the key literature, theories, and methodologies of gender diversity through weekly presentations and workshops given by the academic supervisors. Thereby ESRs were able to build a solid interdisciplinary and intersectional foundation for their projects. G-VERSTY’s training events provided them with complementary skills training, namely ethical issues, interdisciplinary collaboration, Open Science, Intellectual Property Rights, Mitigating Gender Bias, publication strategies, research data management, and professional media communication to non-academic audiences.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

G-VERSITY’s research programme will (1) produce cutting-edge knowledge of problems associated with gendered educational and professional pathways that circumvent gender diversity, and (2) generate a practical toolbox with applicable knowledge for use in the workplace to attain gender diversity. G-VERSITY will provide the prototype for a novel research and training programme on gender diversity. The trained researchers will become the agents of change and innovation. They will have the knowledge of theories and the principles to reduce trial and error, and the tools and methods to help employers in the private and public sectors bring about the changes and innovations needed to promote and facilitate gender diversity.

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