The LIBRA project aims to promote gender equality in research. It assesses gender biases and career development challenges at participating institutions through staff surveys, implicit association tests, and institutional data analysis. Based on the results, each institution develops a Gender Equality Plan with actions to address areas like recruitment, career development, work-life balance, and integrating sex/gender dimensions into research. The LIBRA project also collaborates with the Athena SWAN program and shares structural similarities for assessing gender equality and developing action plans.
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LIBRA - Boosting gender
equality in research
Sonja Reiland, Natalia Dave Coll @CRG Barcelona
Laura Norton @The Babraham Institute, Cambridge
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020
Research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 665937.
Follow us:
http://www.eu-libra.eu/
Twitter: @libra_science
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Data
All data presented at the conference were deleted in this version. Once
the whole consortium agreed on the dissemination of those data, they
will be made available on our website.
Thanks for understanding.
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LIBRA & EU-life
Gender Expert organisation
Areas of intervention
• Recruit without Gender Bias
• Support Career Development
• Increase Work-Life Balance
• Integrate Sex & Gender Dimension in
Research
How
1. Assess Gender Equalities
2. Tailor Gender Equality Plans
3. Implementation
4. Sustainability
Horizon 2020, Science with and for Society Work Programme, call
for “Promoting Gender Equality in Research and Innovation”.
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LIBRA - assessment
Institutional data assessment
Implicit Association Test
Staff survey
Diagnostic Report (not public)
Staff bias
Staff perception
Career Dev.
WLB
Sex/Gender dimension
in research
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Implicit Association Test
Analysis how quickly and accurately you were able to categorize…
Gender-Science Task Gender-Career Task
… Natural science words
with male compared to female
AND
Liberal arts words with female compared
to male
…. Career words with male compared
to female
AND
Family words with female compared to
male
Are you gender biased? To the test… www.eu-libra.eu
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Science
Men
Women
Implicit Association Test
Career
Men
Women
All participants
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Staff Survey - Career Development
1. Where do you see yourself working after your current position?
2. Based on your experience, what do you think makes a career in academia attractive?
3. Based on your experience, what do you think makes a career in academia challenging?
4. If you were to consider leaving academia, what might encourage you to remain?
5. What do you think is the one initiative that would enable a more equal gender representation in science?
6. Please answer the following statements on a scale of strongly agree to strongly disagree (see next slides)
7. Do you feel encouraged to pursue a career in academic research - if yes by whom?
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Sex and Gender dimension in Research
Sex is a biological variant.
This is often overlooked,
resulting in the result of
data that either has no
been segregated for sex, or
is representative of only
one sex. This hinders the
usefulness of data.
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Staff Survey - Work Life Balance
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LIBRA Survey- Work and Personal Life Integration
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LIBRA Survey- Work and Personal Life Integration
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Methods for assessing WLB at Babraham Institute
• Civil service survey
• Athena SWAN staff consultations
• LIBRA staff survey
• Uptake of facilities and policies
• 6 monthly analysis of data
• Committees (e.g. Post Doc committee, graduate committee, Athena
SWAN committee)
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LIBRA Data - Work and Personal Life Integration
In groups discuss what actions you
could take forward to improve WLB
after looking at this data.
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Awareness:
• Blog, internet, social media
• Poster Campaigns
• Role models
• My life in Science seminar series
• All GLs including a my life in science aspect to
seminars
• Working with schools, nurseries, public
engagement
• Sharing good practice
Policies, Entitlements
• Reducing hours/increasing hours
• Flexible working policy
• Job sharing
• Parental leave policies
• Return to work policies
• Funding (carers, conference travel- childcare)
• Meeting times (core hours)
Actions- Work and Personal Life Integration
Facilities:
• Nursery, after school club, holiday clubs
• Emergency childcare (recommendations, nanny, funding)
• On site housing (subsidies, loans)
• Remote access to computing facilities (support)
• Food, canteen, healthy options
• Sport, gym, clubs
• Social clubs, bars, book clubs,
• Shower facilities,
• Bike sheds (travel to work loans, funding)
• Shop/cash machine
• Nappy changing facilities, lactation room
• Allotments
• Gardens
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LIBRA – Gender Equality Plans
Institutional data
assessment
Implicit Association
Test
Staff survey
Diagnostic Report (not
public)
Staff bias
Staff perception
Career Dev.
WLB
Sex/Gender dimension
in research
Gender
Equality Plan
(GEP)
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LIBRA – Gender Equality Plans
1. Template developed by ASDO
2. “Menu” of actions provided by WP
leader
3. Actions selected by institutional
GEP teams
4. Planning and implementation of
actions at the institutes
1
2
3
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LIBRA – Gender Equality Plans
Menu of 84 actions categorized in 4 areas of intervention
0
5
10
15
20
25
30
Recruitment Career development Work-Life-Balance Sex/Gender
dimension in research
# recommended
# coordinated
# optional
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LIBRA – Gender Equality Plans
Area of
intervention
“Optional” actions frequently chosen by LIBRA partner institutes
Recruitment • Information sheet/brochure about work-life benefits, dual career opportunities etc. to be included when
sending out offers or handed to candidates during on‐site interviews (7)
• Present statistics about gender relevant recruitment data to the Faculty of the institution (6)
Career
Development
• Seminars for PhD students and postdocs about opportunities in non‐academic scientific sectors (7)
• Participate in the mentoring program for young female PIs (6)
Work-Life-
Balance
• Hosting “My life in science” seminars, highlighting challenges and benefits of maintaining a good WLB (4)
• Providing rooms for breastfeeding/milk pumping/nappy changing (4)
Sex/Gender
dimension of
research
• Identify research groups with experience on gendered research, in the field of the institute’s research topic.
Organizing visits and working seminars for researchers to learn how to integrate sex/gender dimension into
their project planning (4).
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LIBRA v Athena SWAN – Structural similarities
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LIBRA v Athena SWAN – Structural similarities
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LIBRA and Athena SWAN – benefits
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Discussion 2
LIBRA achievements
1. Increased awareness
2. Assessment of where we are
regarding Gender Equality
3. Engagement of directors and
action plan to improve the
situation for Gender Equality
Challenges we still face
1. Feedback from colleagues that
they are saturated with the
topic “Gender”
2. Less participation of men in
survey and gender related
events
3. Engagement of scientists
How can we address these challenges?
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The LIBRA - Team
Advisory Board
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Thanks for your attention
Sonja Reiland
LIBRA project manager
sonja.reiland@crg.eu
Laura Norton
LIBRA/Athena SWAN manager
laura.norton@babraham.ac.uk
Natalia Dave Coll
LIBRA project manager
natalia.dave@crg.eu
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020
Research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 665937.
Follow us:
http://www.eu-libra.eu/
Twitter: @libra_science
Notes de l'éditeur
Welcome everybody to the LIBRA workshop about: Boosting gender equality in research. LIBRA is a European funded coordinated and support action, and stands for “Leading Innovative measures to reach gender Balance in Research Activities”, yes, you can play around with the letters to come up with the acronym LIBRA…
My name is Sonja Reiland, I am the project manager of LIBRA, with me is today Natalia Dave, who is also a project manager and who covered me during my recent maternity leave and who is since then my sparing partner for all LIBRA related topic. And she is the one who was driving force to really propose this workshop, start sharing our experiences and data, even though we are still in our first year. And Laura Norton from one of our project partners, the Babraham institute in Cambridge. She is managing all LIBRA related activities at Babraham as well all activities related to the Athena Swan action plan. Today she will give you kind of the UK perspective of LIBRA and gender equality activities.
We hope that you will be able to benefit from our results and achievements, and that we will have interesting discussions, and so we can learn from you as well. We are planning to record the session, only audio, in order to document your comments and questions and ideas. Writing everything down would distract us too much from being present here. We are presenting brand new data, which are not published nor shared yet. So any feedback from you will be very interesting for us, and depending on how the discussions are developing we might want to include your concerns and ideas in future activities or publications. Does somebody mind that we do record audio of the session?
Alright, so lets get started with a 2 min video, where you will meet some of our LIBRA partners speaking about the motivation of the project.
The project addresses the Horizon 2020 call for “Promoting Gender Equality in Research and Innovation” under the Science with and for Society Work Programme.
Where are we in the project? We Started in October 2015, we did the assessment where are we standing today regarding gender equality, and today all the 10 research institutes have a Gender Equality Plan. The next steps are to prepare the implementation, do all the planning for the action implementation, even update the GEPs. The project is supporting the GEP actions with coordinated activities and expertise sharing. ASDO the gender experts are monitoring our activities and gives advise. And soon we will have start the planning for sustainability.
That means, today we are able to share with you firstly, our experiences in the assessment for gender equality, and share with you what we found out, the first data we have… And secondly, experiences of developing GEPs and try to give you a glimpse about the compilation of our partners GEPs. In both topics Laura will give you some more details from the perspectives of the Babraham institute, which is located here in the UK.
Diagnostic Report were based on the assessment form. We can share the general form, but this one we tailored for each institute. The general we will share on the website. Give examples of which data were collected… conceptually
Recruitment was not included in the Staff survey as this is more about institutional processes than personal perception
Story or picture for implicit association
Accuaracy and reaction time are used to calculate a score (called d-score) which is indicating how strong your association of science and carrer is rather with men compared to women. It uses a methodology developed by Harvard university and which is now run by the Project “Implicit”. We subcontracted them to provide the platform for running the analysis in the framework of LIBRA.
We shared with you today our data about the staff bias and and staff perception at the LIBRA partner institutes. These data, besides the diagnostic report from ASDO was and still is the basis for each institute to develope their GEP. Now, I will shortly describe how we coordinated the process of the development.
GEP template will be provided on the LIBRA website
Recruitment (Rec): High commitment from proposal stage on
Career Development (CDV): High level of coordination
Work-Life-Balance (WLB): Decisions dependent on institute and country
Sex/Gender dimension in research (SGR): New area for almost all partners
In a nutshell, all institutes commit to far more actions than have been recommended, with different priorities towards the areas of interventions.
