European Research Council adopted Gender Equality Plan

On 7 June 2021 the European Research Council´s Scientific Council adopted Gender Equality Plan (GEP) with an aim to support excellent frontier researchers across Europe, irrespective of nationality, gender or age. This issue is addressed by ERC Scientific Council’s Gender Issues Working Group which built on the GEP created during H2020 and now it has developed a new GEP for Horizon Europe programme.

One of the aims is to focus on top-researchers of underrepresented gender and to encourage them to apply for ERC grants. ERC will also spread an awareness about its strategy, steps and measures to address this issue, through following steps: 1. Continue including gender statistics and ERC's work to achieve gender balance in all general presentations on the ERC, 2. Continue raising awareness about consideration of sex and gender dimension in the design of research projects, 3. Identifying ambassadors in various countries and research domains to encourage more applications to ERC grants from underrepresented groups of researchers, 4. Continue including successful grantees of both genders as role models in communication activities, such as brochures, posters, videos, etc. Another objective of the ERC is to guarantee a gender fair evaluation process of the project proposals, by achieving in a medium term gender balance in each ERC evaluation panel as well as among the panel chairs.

All adopted steps and measures to achieve the objectives are stated in ERC  Scientific Council´s the Gender Equality Plan.