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European Commission, Directorate General for Research and Innovation, FP7-SCIENCE-IN-SOCIETY 2011-1, STAGES, Structural Transformation to Achieve Gender Equality in Science (SiS.2011.2.1.1.-1)
Project co-funded by the General Inspectorate for relations with the European Union of the Italian Ministry of Economy and Finance (IGRUE).
UAIC Research Group on Gender Equality in Science is a multidisciplinary research team set up within the frame of the STAGES project in order to conduct scientific studies and evaluations on Gender Equal Opportunities in Romanian educational and research institutions, particularly at the UAIC (see the main objectives, research group members, research and publications).
Since 2013, "Gender Equality in Science" is a theme for PhD studies at the UAIC. Prof. dr. Doina Balahur, scientific coordinator for PhD in Sociology, announced the topics and the bibliography for 2014 candidates competition. As for 2013, the research will be carried out in cooperation with the FP7 European project STAGES at the UAIC. (more info here).
The second UAIC internal grants competition for young researchers, 2015-2016, brought 41 candidates from the two Interdisciplinary Research Departments - of Nature Sciences and Social-Humanistic Sciences, respectively, and also from different faculties (Biology, Computer Science, European Studies Centre, Geology, History, Physics, Economics and Business Administration, Letters). The grants competition was set up to stimulate scientific excellence of young female and male researchers (under 35 years) who are having a work contract with the "Alexandru Ioan Cuza" University and publications in international recognised journals. Following the evaluation process, 25 grants have been awarded. The major novelty this second competition brought refers to the eligibility of the young female and male researchers with career interruption of maximum 18 month within the last two years. This way, by such a measure could also benefited female and male researchers with career interruption due to caring responsibilities for dependent children and maternal/paternal leave. On this occasion the "Alexandru Ioan Cuza" University reaffirmed the support for work-life balance measures as a condition of gender equality in science and academia. The success rate of women researchers from the STEM disciplines who have applied and were eligible was 100% and for women researchers from the Social Sciences and Humanities disciplines of 45%. The results of the evaluations have been published in December 2015 and on the 4th of January the work contracts have been signed.
The 9th Workshop of the European University Association, Council for Doctoral Education (EUA-CDE), organized at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands on the 20-21 January 2016, brought together more than 100 participants who discussed the topic of the Doctoral Supervision – practices and responsibilities. An important issue approached focused on gender sensitive supervision. The "Alexandru Ioan Cuza" University and the Centre for Gender Equality in Science have been represented at the workshop by Prof. Dr. Adriana Prodan, Deputy Director of the UAIC Doctoral School, Director of the PhD School of Economics and Business Administration, and Deputy Director of the UAIC Centre for Gender Equality in Science. As a participant at this international meeting, Professor Adriana Prodan shared the experience on gender equality in science developed last years by the UAIC-STAGES project at our university as well as on the new PhD research specialization in this topic initiated since 2013 by the UAIC-STAGES project.
On the 26 of January the UAIC-STAGES project team sent to the coordinator the third periodic narrative Report (on the period 1 January 2015-31 December 2015) as well as the final Report, in order to be submitted to the EC and uploaded on the European projects database. The 3rd Report represents, as a matter of facts, a synthesis of all the actions and activities undertaken within the project's life cycle aiming to achieve its main objectives and effective outcomes. The Report refers to the strategic approach adopted by the UAIC-STAGES team, the richness of the self-tailored Action Plan and its permanent dynamics and development according to the stakeholders' needs, targeted results and changes that occurred at the UAIC institutional level as well as in the national legal and administrative landscape. It has more than 65 pages organized in four sections.
Describing the UAIC Action Plan (AP) the Report underlined that it targeted 9 out of 15 faculties, namely Biology, Chemistry, Physics, Geography & Geology (Life and Earth Sciences), Mathematics, and Computer science (Formal Sciences), Economics and Social Political sciences (Social Sciences) and Letters (Humanities), but its outcomes extended and benefited to the whole university. The Report also emphasized that it also was designed, from its inception phase, to develop a participatory strategy of implementation, so as to integrate different categories of beneficiaries and stakeholders: academics, researchers, managers as well as PhD, MA and BA students. The Action Plan foresaw also partnerships and cooperation with the national agencies responsible for higher education evaluation and research funding (ARACIS, UEFISCDI) and the Ministry of Education and Research, thus ensuring the possibility to generate a positive impact at national level for other academic and research institutions in Romania.
The Action Plan initially had 29 actions, to which 11 new actions have been added during years 2nd, 3rd and 4th of the project, being thus, by far, the richest one among the consortium's partners. Finally, at the end of the project, a total of 41 main actions were included in the ACTION PLAN for WP4. Given that the most of them had 3-4 different annual editions, a total of more than 90 actions were in fact implemented following the development of the self-tailored AP. For more details on the Strategy, Action Plan and the main achievements, please follow the link.
The UAIC-STAGES team also brought its valuable contribution to the final report of the STAGES project with detailed documents on the Communication and Dissemination activities initiated and provided within the life span of the project, and also with the list about the Exploitable foreground described according to three categories - i.e, General advancement of knowledge, Exploitation of R&D results via standards, and Exploitation of results through (social) innovation. In these documents are included more than 100 contributions of the UAIC-STAGES team as: scientific communications at International Conferences, documentary/promotional films on women in science, documentary exhibition "UAIC - A Place for Women in Science", TV interviews, talk-shows and reports on the STAGES' actions, mass media commentaries and press releases on the public events organised within the frame of the project, dedicated articles on international websites and other networking media as well as more than 20 deliverables, reports and presentations on the UAIC-STAGES activities. All these documents have been uploaded on the EC database. For more information on the communication and dissemination activities of the UAIC-STAGE team, please, follow the link.
George Ichim, PhD student in Sociology (with a research theme on Gender equality in science) and member of the UAIC-STAGES team, has represented the Centre for Gender Equality in Science from the "Alexandru Ioan Cuza" University at the final Conference of the project "Mobilizing universities to combat discrimination", run by the National Council for Combating Discrimination"(CNCD) in partnership with Romanian Academic Society (SAR). Participating at the debates George Ichim presented the achievements of the UAIC-STAGES project on gender equality in science and academia and emphasized that the "Alexandru Ioan Cuza" University is the single university in Romania that has developed and implemented a self-tailored Gender Equality Plan within the framework of the STAGES project during 1 January 2012 and 31 December 2015, and now the ongoing activities are held in the follow-up period of the project.
The first issue of a new informative newsletter that focuses on the "Horizon 2020" (the EU funding programme for Research & Innovation) has been recently published online by the UAIC Department for Research and Projects Management in order to provide information on the funding opportunities for the UAIC researchers. The content of this newsletter is designed to give answers to some key questions as: What is the Horizon 2020 Programme? How is it functioning? What funding opportunities are provided by current open competitions and the next expected ones? What FP7 and Horizon 2020 Projects have been run at the UAIC? (see http://www.uaic.ro/newsletter/30525/). It is significant that most of the illustrations of this first issue are collected from our website dedicated to the UAIC-STAGES project, while the head of Department, Ms. Elena Felice, has also been a member of our project team.
The European Commission has published the new edition of the report entitled She Figures 2015. This publication is the fifth edition of the She Figures series, which is released every three years since 2003, with the declared aim to monitor the level of progress made towards gender equality in research and innovation in the European Union. Like in the previous editions, the report analyses comparable statistics on women and men amongst PhD graduates, researchers and decision-makers, and presents data on differences in working conditions. It also presents for the first time the situation of men and women in scientific publications and patent applications, as well as the inclusion of the gender dimension in scientific articles. The series She Figures already represents both a referential analytical tool for a rigorous documentation on existing gender disparities in science in all the EU member states and also a challenging "go-to" document, that invites to change the actual state of facts and to do structural transformation in research institutions in order to achieve gender equal opportunities and outcomes. The She Figures 2015 was produced in close collaboration between the EC's Directorate General for Research and Innovation, the Helsinki Group on Gender in Research and Innovation, as well as representatives from Eurostat, OECD, EIGE and other institutions specialized in the assessment of science and technology (S&T) activities. As the coordinator of the FP7 Project STAGES at the UAIC, Prof. Dr. Doina Balahur, has also given expert consultation on gender equality indicators for the Romanian analysis in the stage of report preparation, and, similarly as in the previous years, the UAIC Centre for Gender Equality in Science will use the data and the resources of this new EC Report in its analyses, workshops and trainings.
Due to our mutual beneficial partnership between the UAIC-STAGES project and national, regional and mass media, prestigious women researchers form UAIC have increasingly been invited to present their scientific and personal achievements to a wider public, this way highlighting once more the link of science with society at large. Illustrative in this respect is the invitation addressed by the TVR Iasi to Prof. Dr. Elena Bîcu (Faculty of Chemistry), member of the Scientific Committee of the Centre for Gender Equality in Science of the "Alexandru Ioan Cuza "University of Iasi, to share her life experience as women in academia and research at the one hour TV talk show entitled "Guess who's coming at the dinner". Professor Elena Bîcu has been awarded in 2014 by the UAIC-STAGES project with the Women's Annual Science and Technology Excellence Award "Magda Petrovanu" for her scientific activity, role model and mentorship for young scientists, and is an active contributor of many of our activities for promoting gender equality in science, such as suggestive images from our documentary film dedicated to her personality have also showed. Being guest of TVR Iasi, she emphasised the high impact the STAGES project had in our university on raising awareness on women's contribution to scientific research and gender equality in science issues. (see http://www.tvrplus.ro//editie-ghici-cine-vine-la-cina-432011).
Already being a traditional event, the 5th annual workshop of the UAIC Network of Women in Academia and Research was held on the 8th of April 2016 at the UAIC Centre for Gender Equality in Science (CGES). The agenda of the meeting included, like all the time, an overview and evaluation of the activities carried out by the Network last year as well as the projection of the next steps and activities to be carried out in 2016, its provisional schedule and main responsible persons. On this occasion the members of the Network have been given a printed version of the Guidelines on "Structural Transformation to Achieve Gender Equality in Science", at which, most of them, contributed as co-authors. The Network members also decided that the annual public event "Women Researchers day", the 4th edition 2016, to be held on October, being integrated in the agenda of "The University Days", as a series of events that celebrate 156 years since the creation of the UAIC. The meeting has been attended by Prof. Dr. Doina Balahur, Director of the Centre for Gender Equality in Science (CGES), Prof. Dr. Adriana Prodan (Faculty of Economics and Business Administration), Deputy Director of the CGES, Prof. Dr. Elena Bicu (Faculty of Chemistry), Assoc. Prof. Dr. Lenuta Alboaie (Faculty of Computer Science), Assoc. Prof. Dr. Iuliana Breaban (Faculty of Geography and Geology), Assoc. Prof. Dr. Vera Popescu (Faculty of Letters), Ms. Elena Felice, Head of the Department of Projects Management - as members of the Scientific Committee of the CGES and members of the Administrative Board of CGES, as well as by Dr. Magdalena Vicovan, Ichim George, PhD student, Rares Miron, PhD student, Petronela Munteanu, PhD student and Catrinel Zaharia, PhD student.
Within the frame of the COST Action IS 1409 Gender and health impacts of policies extending working life in western countries, Prof. Dr. Daniela Soitu (Department of Sociology and Social Work, and member of the UAIC Network of Women in Academia and Research and of the Scientific Committee of the UAIC Centre for Gender Equality in Science) has organized, in cooperation with Babes-Bolyai University of Cluj Napoca, a national workshop on Gender, health and multidisciplinary research on life course. The themes of the one day workshop and the debates that took place were a new opportunity to highlight the gender dimension in scientific research so as Prof. Dr. Doina Balahur has emphasized in her intervention. The top management of the University was represented by Prof. Dr. Dumitru Luca, Vice-Rector. The event was attended by more than 100 participants - professors, researchers, deans and vice-deans, from the UAIC, by the representatives of the local public authorities and of the National Agency for Equal Opportunities between Men and Women.