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 MPIN:
Following an extensive data collection and analysis with many additional indicators and information having been collected also from interviews with staff members, the Max Planck Institute of Neurobiology identifies five main sites of inequality which are being tackled with a set of 21 measures:
The first site of inequality “Leaky Pipeline among woman scientists in combination with fewer publications and awards in comparison with men scientists” is being tackled with seven independent measures from the fields of “Increase in the participation of women in research and innovation and improvement of their career prospects”, “Recruitment process” and “Understanding the Organization”. A basic element is the self-commitment of all MPIN staff with recruitment responsibility to increase the proportion of women researchers on the post doc, the group leader and the director-level to certain numbers. The exact goals in percentage are fixed till the year 2030. Other measures aimed at improving the career prospects of women researchers are a mentoring programm at the Institute, a regular lunch meeting for women and non-binary researchers, career an empowerment trainings for women and non-binary researchers, criteria list for acknowledgement as author of a publication being published transparently for everyone and regular reports on research progress, project contributions and authorhsips to the PIs. Additionally there is a further data collection announced to understand in more depth why women are at a disadvantage regarding many factors important for career-development and why they are dropping out of academia more often than men.
The second site of inequality detected is “Biases and Discrimination in the Share of Privileges and in the Everyday Treatment of Female Researchers including Sexual Harassment and other forms of violence”. The action fields of the measures counteracting this equality are: awareness rising regarding gender biases and discrimination, prevention of sexual harassment and gender-based violence and monitoring of reports on discrimination, sexul harassment and gender-based violence. The heart of this section are mandatory awareness-rising talks and trainings on prevention of sexual harassment for all employees. The monitoring foresees repeating the surveys done for the GEP in a two-year rhythm.
The third site of inequality “Difficulties with capability of family and career in research” had already been addressed with a broad range of measures before the design of the GEP, so that the main newly designed measure in this field is a further data collection on how well-known and effective the already existing measures are.
The fourth site of inequality “Gender imbalance in non-scientific jobs” is being tackled mainly by measures in the field of recruitment: a self-commitment for a more gender-balanced recruiting with fixed goals until the year 2021, participation in a gender-separate vocational orientation event for pupils to introduce to them jobs that are seldomly chosen by persons of their gender and gender sensitive representation of MPIN at vocational fairs. One of the measures is specifically aimed at improving the working conditions of staff in the lowest pay grades, which are mainly women. The respective staff members will be offered support to get higher qualified jobs within the Institute.
The fifth site of inequality “Gender imbalance in committees and honorary positions” is addressed by a self-commitment by the chair of committees, directors and group leaders to increase the number of women in two important committees of MPIN and the proportion of men in honorary positions. The goals with exact percentages to be reached are fixed until 2025.
Regarding the action field “Gender Budgeting” – where the MPIN GEP will serve as a good practice example for the whole Max Planck Society – a Gender Budgeting capacity building is planned for all members of MPIN staff that make budget decisions, at the Institute-level (mainly directors) but also on a day-to-day basis regarding only certain cost centers (staff from the administration but also the departments and research groups). A set of indicators for a gender budgeting analysis will be developed and then be collected regularly for the annual GE-reports.
The MPIN GEP is characterized by following strictly the needs for action identified in the data analysis, thereby ensuring a good institutional fit of the measures. Special is also the report on the success on numerous measures that already existed before the GEP and the usage of the instrument of binding self-commitments to percentages of men/women in certain functions to be reached at a certain date.