The general goal of the GE Academy project is to develop and implement a coherent and high-quality capacity-building programme on gender equality (GE) in research and innovation (R&I) as well as in Higher Education (HE). GE Academy will develop and provide a series of comprehensive training formats and tailor-made training materials for trainers, practitioners and researchers, making these available to the widest possible audience in Europe and beyond. The GE Academy, with its full capacity-building programme including different training formats (Train-the-Trainers, physical trainings and interactive workshops, Summer Schools, webinars, online Distributed Open Collaborative Courses), will be built and executed in at least 15 countries.

Through its ambitious setup, the project aims at filling a gap in the current EU research landscape, marked by ongoing gender inequality in research organisations, the gender dimension of R&I being ignored or under-addressed, whereas needs in terms of gender awareness and capacity are recognised, but efforts to remedy the situation are still fragmented. The project will respond to the needs of those who contribute to and are involved in institutional change towards gender equality in R&I as well as in HE. The GE Academy will both tackle issues of gender equality in research institutions and research teams through structural change and address the gender dimension of research contents, following the three main ERA objectives for gender equality in research. At the same time, a pan-European network of gender trainers will be established, trained, coached and upskilled for delivering gender training sessions to R&I and HE communities in Europe and beyond. Throughout the project’s lifetime, attention will be paid to seeking modalities and solutions for ensuring the sustainability of the GE Academy project beyond the EU funding period.

Project Objectives

GE Academy will:

1. take stock of existing resources and expertise in promoting GE in R&I, encompassing different approaches, problem areas, needs and tools in an inclusive and participatory perspective
2. improve the understanding of GE within the R&I community by developing, testing, rolling out, evaluating and refining a robust set of capacity-building formats and accompanying training materials, covering institutional change issues as well as the integration of the gender dimension in R&I contents
3. support its target audiences to get in contact with the community of experts and stakeholders active on GE in R&I and to become familiar with the tools, resources and expertise available within this community
4. strive for a wide, balanced and sustainable uptake of gender issues across Europe and beyond through the implementation of a series of capacity building trainings in at least 15 European countries and making the developed training materials widely publicly available
5. build a pan-European network of qualified trainers on GE in research
6. contribute to a better integration and coordination of initiatives and efforts to foster Gender Equality in R&I, supporting their sustainability

Press release 1 (October 2019): Gender Equality Academy is commencing its cycle of training sessions
Press release 2 (January 2020): Gender Equality Academy invites candidates for the Train-the-Trainers session in Berlin
Press release 3 (June 2020): Gender Equality Academy announces its first Distributed Open Collaborative Course