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Shaping Gender Equality Policies in IST-ICT Research Institutions

Reflective Negotiations from the Participatory Audit to Design of Gender Equality Plans

Maria Sangiuliano    Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia, Italia    

Claudia Canali    Università degli Studi di Modena e Reggio Emilia, Italia    

Vasiliki Madesi    Vilabs OE, Thessaloniki, Greece    

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abstract

One of the critical issues highlighted by the existing literature on structural change for gender equality refers to the tensions and negotiations between the transformative goal of gender equality policies and the multiple ways they can be re-assumed and incorporated into existing policies and institutional goals. Institutional change can happen via small steps by exploiting existing discursive opportunities, or it can be overtly resisted and seen as a destabilizing factor for the status quo and existing power structures. The H2020 EQUAL-IST (Gender Equality Plans for Information Sciences and Technology Research Institutions) project supported 6 Universities across Europe starting from their Informatics and/or Information Systems Departments to initiate the design and implementation of gender equality plans from a field such as ICT/IST featured by extremely low representation of female researchers and full professors. The chapter analyzes the internal assessment phase and the preliminary steps of the initiated design process : based on a mixed methodology and a participatory approach to design gender equality policies, quantitative data collection has gone hand in hand with a qualitative Participatory Gender Audit: staff members and students discussed the main challenges related to gender inequalities and an idea generation process was kicked off. Discrepancies between the ‘diagnostic’ aspect of assessing problems and ‘prognostic’ ideas for measures and solutions are highlighted, leading to interesting insights as far as the afore-mentioned tensions are concerned.

Published
Dec. 17, 2019
Language
EN
ISBN (PRINT)
978-88-6969-335-9
ISBN (EBOOK)
978-88-6969-334-2

Keywords: IST research organizationsGender Equality Plans (GEPS)Structural changesGender auditsParticipatory assessment and design

Copyright: © 2019 Maria Sangiuliano, Claudia Canali, Vasiliki Madesi. This is an open-access work distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction is permitted, provided that the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. The license allows for commercial use. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.