Dear LeTSGEPs friends!

Here we are, summer is blossoming at its maximum brightness and most of us are dealing with holidays, whether preparing for them, already on an exotic beach or just returned.

What a better time to reflect on the achievements we obtained in the last months and the results that are yet to come!

In March, in our previous Newsletter

We talked about LeTSGEPs first year of work, a period that we could not define but “creative, stimulating, challenging and.. fool!”. Despite pandemic and the total shift of all project’s activities on digital platforms, we achieved every milestone, mainly focusing on preparatory activities like training sessions on Gender Budgeting and Gender Equality Plan, dissemination and communication activities, events, workshops, conferences, Stakeholders’ involvement, state-of-the-art reports.

A very important training tool we developed in the first LeTSGEPs year was the RPO’s Gender Auditing & Gender Budgeting Methodology Report  which integrated GEPs and Gender Budgeting methodologies offering to LeTSGEPs partners a common basis of knowledge on these topics.

Since March we worked hard on two main issues that are of basic importance for our project, since all the next activities until the end of LeTSGEPs are based on them: The Context  and Gender Auditing analysis and the Gender Equality Plan.

All the preparatory work of the first LeTSGEPs year finally converged in these two deliverables that represented for our implementing partners a huge step forward their RPOs’ transformative change for equal opportunities.

The Context  and Gender Auditing Analysis

is the starting point for each RPOs willing to explore the current situation and to evaluate choices and commitments to gender equality. It represents the starting phase for the preparation of the Gender Equality Plan (GEP) and the Gender Budget (GB) and includes four parts that concern the analysis of gender disaggregated indexes, of gender implicit bias, of the RPO’s gender policies and gender budgets’ state-of-the-art. Each implementing partner followed the same analysis framework and produced its own report, then an overall report summoned the main results, with great satisfaction for all: a very intense work, carried on over the last 6 months was completed at last!

But the best was yet to come.

A few weeks later LeTSGEPs partners could also release their official first

Gender Equality Plans!

This was really a very challenging moment for our consortium, since everyone had to fight with internal obstacles, delays, objections, but at last we had six new and unprecedented Gender Equality Plans that none of our implementing partners  had ever developed before.

Like any truly transformative and innovative process, this final result was hard to achieve, many negotiations and compromises were made, but in the end we got it!

We are all very proud of our partners’ Gender Equality Plans, and we are confident that the next two foreseen rounds of implementation will further improve them in terms of gender impact and effectiveness.

Anyway, all these results would have not been possible without the support of the

Project management activities

that, besides the everyday work, were engaged in very important events in these last months, like the Scientific Advisory Board (SAB) meeting. In this occasion a very interesting discussion and debate took place and the SAB members could give key suggestions for the analysis of the first projects’ results and for their use for the next steps ahead.

Also the Mentors’ meeting was important to discuss any difficulties experienced by implementing partners in sharing LeTSGEPs’ methodology.

In May and June all the consortium was then engaged in preparing the technical report, slides and presentation for the First reporting period (submitted in May 2021) and the Commission review (in June 2021): a very hard work but extremely useful also to have an overall view of what we have done so far.

The internal presentation at the 4^th Project meeting (organised by CY in May 2021) was the occasion for a final rehearsal before the meeting with the Commission: yes, we were ready!

While working on contents and methodologies also

Communication and dissemination activities

carried on, with the second round of internal events that each implementing partner organized at their institution, with the social media activities and with the participation of Unimore, the LeTSGEPs Coordinator, at two international conferences with three academic papers presented, at ICGR Conference and at STS Graz Conference2021.

..and here we are now! A little bit tired but very satisfied of these months’ work.

Now let’s all have a very well deserved and safe rest, to meet again full of energy, proposal and enthusiasm, ready for new LeTSGEPs adventures!

See you soon!