Empowering women in leadership & decision-making: Critically addressing conscious & unconscious biases

Women are underrepresented in decision-making processes in research performing organisations. With recent reports stating the EU will reach gender equality in 60 years, there is plenty of work to do right now. The MINDtheGEPs project works to deconstruct the gendered bias that men make better leaders, to introduce gender equality targets in key decision-making bodies at partner institutions and as a result keep European research competitive.

With these recommendations, we support gender equality in research by showing research performing organisations and teams how they can work to counter the pervasive belief that women self-select towards inequality, that they lack confidence and competitiveness, and prioritize family over career, and that this is what causes their choice of research fields, time allocation between research and teaching, and publishing strategies. These recommendations also challenge the notion that leadership is associated with masculine traits.

This brief contains a series of recommendations and a compilation of initiatives from different organisations and offers guidance on how to deal with gender imbalances in research organisations. But there is no one-size-fits-all solution. Organisations come in different shapes and sizes. These recommendations are a selection to pick and choose from to tackle the unique gender equality challenges.