European Commission Launches New Award for Gender Equality Champions
The prize will support academic and research institutions in EU Member States and Horizon Europe associated countries to recognise their achievements in implementing gender equality measures.
The European Commission has launched a new competition to recognise and reward academic and research institutions that have achieved outstanding results through implementing gender equality measures.
The award is designed to encourage the development of inclusive gender equality plans and policies in the framework of the new European Research Area (ERA). It will further complement the requirement to have Gender Equality Plans (GEP) as an eligibility criterion for higher education and research organisations applying to Horizon Europe.
The prize also intends to raise public awareness of the importance of addressing gender equality in academic and research organisations through institutional change, and to incentivise a high degree of commitment to implementing inclusive gender equality plans. It is intended that the prize will create a community of champions to inspire other organisations to become gender equality champions themselves.
Applicants may apply to a maximum of one of the following three categories of the award:
- Sustainable Gender Equality Champions: Organisations that can demonstrate a significant and sustained record of activity and a high level of achievement through the implementation of their GEP.
- Newcomer Gender Equality Champions: Organisations that have recently started implementing a GEP and can demonstrate the most progress in its implementation and achieved results.
- Inclusive Gender Equality Champions: Organisations that have developed the most innovative inclusive GEP addressing intersections with other social categories such as ethnicity, social origin, sexual orientation and gender identity (LGBTI+) or disability.
Four prizes worth €100,000 each will be awarded: two will be awarded in category one, and one prize will be awarded in each of categories two and three.
The prize is open to universities, higher education institutions, and research performing organisations (public or private) established in an EU country or a Horizon Europe Associated Country. Only applications submitted by a single legal entity will be permitted.
Applications should be submitted via the Commission’s Funding and Tenders Portal by the 13 October 2022 (17:00) deadline.
(This report was the subject of a ResearchConnect Newsflash.)