Gender Equality

A manifesto for action on gender in research and innovation

A manifesto has emerged from the European Gender Summit, held in Brussels in November, 2011. I encourage you to read the manifesto and to add your name to the list of signatories.

The manifesto is the result of a public consultation carried out by the genSET leadership; it builds on the recommendations of that project and others.

The European Commission invited the scientific community to recommend specific actions that could strengthen the role of women in science and innovation in its new research program, Horizon 2020. Our answer is presented in this manifesto.

The core points are given below. If you’re intrigued, read the complete manifesto and, please, sign it.

We, the undersigned European scientists, scholars and researchers call for integrated and coordinated action on the gender dimension in research and innovation. Striving to enhance the European Research Area and Innovation Union, we wish to:

1 Recognize that past EU Framework Programmes have failed to engage, benefit, and promote women to the same extent as men.

2 Ensure that explicit requirements to address gender issues are included when the priorities of HORIZON 2020 are translated into specific research Calls.

3 Move towards more gender balanced, collective and cooperative systems that: a) welcome diverse leadership styles; b) facilitate more distributed problem solving; c) adopt fair assessment criteria that equally value the inputs of all involved; and d) improve opportunities for different members of society to benefit from science.

4 Consider “whether, and in what sense, sex and gender are relevant in the objectives and methodology of the project” to ensure excellence in research.

5 Assess the merit of women and men fairly.

6 Ensure that the evidence of how gender shapes and is shaped by science is embedded in the science curriculum across all levels.

7 Create research cultures that provide flexible working environments that equally support the careers of women and men by improving the way gender and diversity are managed in universities and research organizations.

8 Ensure that the plans to modernise European universities include opportunities “to enhance the recruitment of women researchers, including women research leaders.”

9 Promote closer collaborations between schools and universities to support efforts to recruit more women into research by creating: a) positive images of women scientists; and b) appreciation of the benefits of science in a multi-cultural, and multi-lingual Europe.

My interest in moving universities towards balance encompasses gender equality, the communication of scientific results, promoting research-based education and leadership development more generally. Read more

Share

No Comments

Republish

I encourage you to republish this article online and in print, under the following conditions.

  • You have to credit the author.
  • If you’re republishing online, you must use our page view counter and link to its appearance here (included in the bottom of the HTML code), and include links from the story. In short, this means you should grab the html code below the post and use all of it.
  • Unless otherwise noted, all my pieces here have a Creative Commons Attribution licence -- CC BY 4.0 -- and you must follow the (extremely minimal) conditions of that license.
  • Keeping all this in mind, please take this work and spread it wherever it suits you to do so!