Handbook of organizational change

The FESTA handbook of organizational change (Implementing gender equality in higher education and research institutions) consists of the central issues and recommendations that partners in the FP7 project FESTA have worked on. The handbook is written for everyone who believes that women and men are equally capable of producing good research and should have equal opportunities to do so.

We believe that women face other and more extensive problems than men in making a research career, and that these problems mainly pertain to the organizations they work in. Consequently, we believe that organizational change is needed to enable both women and men to do research on equal terms.

We are aware that organizational contexts look very different in different European countries. The FESTA teams represent very different institutions: in the beginning some had no gender equality policies at all and hardly any awareness that there might be a problem, while others had policies in place and gender equality had been on the agenda for years. However, the problem with women’s and men’s different conditions exist in them all, in various ways. Because of the different starting points, gender equality issues need to be addressed in different ways.

FESTA has worked in scientific-technical research areas, i.e. areas where women usually are a minority, and our recommendations are adapted to those types of environments. The situation may look different when it comes to humanities and social sciences. Thus, not all recommendations in this handbook fit all contexts, but every context should be able to pick up something that is doable in that particular location.

The FESTA handbook of organizational change.pdf