2nd Advisory Board Meeting: It’s a wrap!

On Wednesday 25 May 2022, TARGETED-MPI held its 2^nd Advisory Board meeting, with the participation of Advisory Board and Steering Committee members.

At the start of the meeting, the Principal Investigator and Project Coordinator, Prof. Eleni Apospori, presented the project’s progress and current outputs to date; the project completed successfully completed the 1^st review from the European Commission and produced substantial outputs which include:

• A conceptual model identifying and classifying factors that negatively affect Gender Equality (GE) in academia
• A methodological framework and the associated tools and templates for the development of partners’ Gender Equality Plans (GEPs)
• The 1^st project Workshop with external stakeholders on the development, implementation and monitoring of GEPs
• Collection of data from partners’ internal stakeholders on GE issues in the partner organisations; their analysis formed the basis for the development of the GEPs
• The 1^st Phase GEPs of five partners
• A methodology and plan for the evaluation of partners’ GEPs
• The ex-ante (i.e. before the development and implementation of GEPs) evaluation of GE of partner institutions
• Implementation plans and monitoring/evaluation indicators for the 1^st Phase GEPs
• Academic output, including two Scholarly Symposia and one Professional Development Workshop at the 2022 Academy of Management meeting and two presentations at the XI European Conference on Gender Equality in Higher Education

Following Prof. Apospori’s overview, the Steering Committee members presented the actions included in their 1^st Phase Gender Equality Plans, which they are currently implementing. The GEP actions cover a wide range of GE issues that partners identified in their institutions, from recruitment and career progression and development, and work-life balance to GE awareness-raising, collection and management of sex- and gender-disaggregated data, and inclusive and gender-aware communication.

The discussion with the Advisory Board Members provided very useful feedback and insights on the development and implementation of the GEPs. The Advisory Board members and consortium partners discussed the long-term impact of the implementation of the GEPs on the partner institutions, and highlighted the importance of the Gender Equality Observatories, that the project partners have established, for the implementation and monitoring of the GEPs.

The next project activities include the completion of the 1^st Phase implementation of the GEPs, their evaluation by the project’s independent evaluator and the development of the revised 2^nd Phase GEPs, taking into account the evaluation feedback and the feedback from the 2^ndStakeholder Workshop which is planned for early 2023.