New report: Not sure how to address gender imbalance in your institution? – here is a toolkit.

We know that scientific institutions very often struggle with gender imbalance, and we know that it can be difficult to address the problem. FESTA wants to see changes in the daily environment of researchers and therefore we present a framework for how to start making such changes. The framework is presented as a toolkit with inspiration for people who know it is necessary to address gender imbalance in their institution but are unsure how.

The toolkit report, Festa Toolkit WP3.2: Towards Raising Organizational Awareness can be downloaded here.

We believe that statistics are useful in underpinning arguments, qualifying discussions on gender and dealing with resistance. Therefore we recommend collecting statistical material that reflects the actual conditions for men and women in your institution. With good statistical material it is possible to have objective and factual discussions.

Moreover, statistics are useful for contributing to evidence based policy making and as starting points for reflection, awareness raising and for spurring action.

Naturally, whether action is in fact taken also depends on other factors, such as politics and resistance. In order to address these possible obstacles, we also discuss practices and examples of how to facilitate the raising of awareness and implementing changes in daily behavoiur. It is our experience, that such practices and examples can be hard to come by.

Our examples include recommendations to conducting dialogues in many different fora in the institutions: with the HR departments, with the Heads of Departments, with the non-scientific staff, with the students, with the General Secretary, with the research centres, with the research boards, etc.

The report is based on experiences from the following institutions: University of Southern Denmark, Uppsala University (Sweden), Aachen University (Germany) and Fondazione Bruno Kessler (Italy).

Contact: Eva Sophia Myers, Head of Secretariat of the Faculty of Science, University of Southern Denmark. Tel +45 6550 1898 and mobile + 45 6011 1898. Email myers@sdu.dk.

toolkit and appendices in one - final 280214.pdf