The key role given to research and innovation in striving towards a smart, sustainable and inclusive growth in Europe means that the EU should make full use of its human capital – thereby involving both men and women.
Evidence shows that research performance is limited by the perpetuation of direct and indirect sex discrimination and that promoting gender equality at all levels contributes to achieving excellence and efficiency. Initiatives to promote gender equality in research have been developed in Europe and the US over a number of years. The focus was initially on specific programmes to help women pursue scientific careers. However, those programmes have proved to be insufficient to increase the number of women in science, particularly in positions of responsibility, and have not helped to address the structural barriers contributing to the well known leaky pipeline phenomenon. […]This report proposes structural change in science institutions as the means to address each of these five sets of problems, so that decision making is more transparent, unconscious bias is removed from institutional practices, human resources management is modernized, excellence is promoted through diversity, and research and innovation are improved by the integration of a gender perspective.
Upload the report (52 p., en): Structural-changes-final-report_en