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 UT:
The UT GEP provides for 22 measures that depicts five areas for action, based on the main areas to be tackled by LeTSGEPs. The actions in these areas are chosen on the basis of the data collection from the survey. Here it has to be mentioned that it is one central goal of the UT-GEP to broaden the base of the data collection.
The first area: “Increase the participation of women in research, innovation and improvement of their career prospects” contains several fundamental steps to a structural anchoring of gender equality work in University of Tirana: the first is the appointment of a “gender focal point” – similar to the function of a Gender Equality Officer – who will be responsible for ensuring gender equality policies at UT. Additionally there is a capacity building workshop planned for the working groups that will be drafting or revising strategic documents and regulations of UT. Another structural measure is the further and more detailed collection of data on gender equality at UT. In order to promote individual research projects for women, annual workshops will be organized, especially designated to the work of multidisciplinary research groups interested in gender issues.
The second area: “Gender balance in leadership and decision-making” will be tackled with a workshop for all UT staff with leadership responsibility in order to build capacity on gender equality issues and ensure their support for considering gender equality issues in the fields of teaching as well as research and for the goal of gender balance among the committee’s members.
The third area: “Integration of gender dimension into research and teaching content” contains two elements: a collection of data on gender in research and teaching, and the introduction of elective courses as a starting point on Gender Equality for Bachelor and Master Programs.
The fourth area: “Work-life balance and organizational culture” is largely based on experiences gained during the Covid 19-pandemic and contains measures for flexible working time arrangements including remote working and a regulation to avoid extended working hours in the late afternoon for parents with small children, referring to the “Code of Labor” of the Republic of Albania. Additionally online courses will be offered as regular teaching options.
Under the fifth area: “Measures to prevent gender-based violence including sexual harassment” there is an implementation of regulations in this field planned, including on complaint procedures. A specific focus based on the data analysis will be put on age-based discrimination of women.
UT’s GEP is accordingly characterized by a comprehensive set of measures which ambitiously and thoroughly build a Gender Equality structure from scratch – with the use of mainly structural and capacity building measures – complemented by measures for individual support of women researchers.
The LeTSGEPs team has started the process of Gender Budgeting in the Accounting Department and Management Department of the Faculty of Economy of the University of Tirana. There has been an analysis of the budget of these departments, trying to link Gender Budgeting to overall gender equality objectives with the aim to restructure and reclassify items. The main goal was for the budget to create equal opportunities for both women and men, so they can have equal access to funding for research, equipment, books, participation in scientific conferences, etc. In the future, priority will be given to the selection of research teams that have a balanced gender representation (in line with the male / female ratios of the academic staff of UT), given that in terms of Horizon 2020 projects, universities that demonstrate such parity, will have a priority in the applications they submit. A specific item in the budget has been introduced regarding the promotion of parity and equality, that is a special scholarship that may be awarded for PhD proposals in the field of GEP and / or GB. Even though the process of budget preparation starts from bottom up, there is not a large freedom scale to apply reclassification because the budget should follow specific and strict lines / items as set from the Treasury System of the Ministry of Finances in Albania. In spite of that fact, introducing the idea of budget reclassification for the first time, could be considered as a success.
The GEP is available here: Gender_Equality_Plan_UT