In June 2021 the LetsGEPs Consortium has achieved the fundamental milestone of the project: the official approval of the Gender Equality Plans for its six implementing partners. It was a very tough target to hit, since none of them had ever implemented a Gender Equality Plan before, and, above all, the debut coincided with the pandemic period: not exactly the best one to promote transformative changes!

Nevertheless, despite fears for Covid, smartworking, work overloads, hilled colleagues to replace, all partners managed to structure and approve their first GEP: a result we are all very  much proud of.

In these weeks all the GEPs are on the way of the implementation process, and project teams are working hard to realize the gender equality measures planned.

In the next months we will therefore report on activities and results, but now we think that a synthetic presentation of the actions and objectives of LeTSTEPs’ GEPs may be helpful to other RPOs willing to engage into the GEPs process.

After all, what a better encouragement: if we managed to release GEP in these conditions, everything is possible!

Today we present here to you the GEP of CY:

 

The CY GEP focuses on six overall goals, based on the data analysis, to be achieved through 35 measures:

The first goal is Assessment, prevention and treatment of pay gaps. The corresponding part of the GEP foresees in-depth analysis of gender pay gaps among different groups of the staff and the set-up of an observatory which ensures the monitoring and assessment of the actions carried out to counteract the identified gaps. The analysis of wages and salaries will also be used to reclassify the budget in a gender sensitive way.

The second goal is to Guarantee the equal access of women and men to jobs and ranks in the public service. This goal is pursued by a broad variety of measures, among others a mentoring program for doctoral students, anti-bias training for all personnel involved in recruiting, ensuring a gender-balanced distribution of managerial tasks in the research departments and further data collection.

The third goal is to Promote the balance between professional activity and family life. It contains among other the expansion of the use of teleworking and promotion of more flexible and individual working hours, information campaigns on all offers for parents and additional more in-depth data collection on the impact of maternity leave on salary and career progression.

The fourth goal is to Fight against sexual and sexist violence, harassment and discrimination. It is pursued with the use of communications campaigns for all staff, by incorporating a corresponding section in the internal regulations of the faculties and administrative departments, by providing training to staff of all different levels and students and organization of networks of local discrimination prevention officers.

The fifth goal – Integrate the gender dimension in research and teaching – contains the implementation of different courses on gender topics in the CY curriculum as well as training sessions on the introduction of gender in research and the establishment of a community of researchers working on gender for exchange.

As a sixth goal Governance, management and monitoring of the equality policy is pursued. It contains an annual report on the success of the GEP, the set up of a network on gender equality advisers and ensuring the budget for training and for obtaining a national gender equality label (AFNOR).

The CY GEP is characterized by measures targeted at all stakeholders of CY University, well differentiated between different types of working contracts, functions and levels and also for students. It already names in great detail the indicators that will be used for the evaluation of its success and is well embedded in national law, which requires CY to design a Gender Equality Plan.

The full GEP report of CY is available here:

https://www.cyu.fr/les-actions-menees-pour-legalite-femmes-hommes

https://www.cyu.fr/actions-menees-a-cy-cergy-paris-universite-pour-lodd-5