Gender Equality Action Plan

The CMA Gender Equality Action Plan includes actions to be undertaken and monitored in order to:

• encourage female scientists to participate in all the CMA’s activities
• ensure equal opportunities for recruitment and promotion at all levels
• encourage women to participate in management and scientific committees

• According to the Gender Equality Action Plan, each CMA institution is to identify a representative to the VIU GM in order to encourage networking and mentoring amongst women involved in the CMA. To improve communication between the VIU-GM and the 19 CMA institutions, the VIU-GM created a network representatives from each institution to act as its contact persons with the VIU GM.

• The Plan foresees the collection of gender-related statistics on the CMA institutions to obtain better understanding of the role of women within the CMA network and monitoring of the progress made in terms of gender balance.

• Other actions to be undertaken are the organization of a Mentoring (Tutorial) Programme for female scientists at the beginning of their careers. The goal of the programme is to help young female scientists start and strengthen their professional careers, help them realize what their strengths are, and recognize how to achieve their goals. The VIU-GM wants to prepare young female scientists for a professional career, offering them the possibility of working with people already established in the field, as well as working as a group of peers. Young female scientists will be able to make themselves more visible when they work together. They will be also able to get support from each other as well as exchange and share their personal concerns and experiences. We encourage both woman-to-woman as well as cross-gender mentoring. The mentors should help the mentees develop a good career plan.

• Ensuring equal opportunities by establishing a recruitment policy in which the gender balance in science will be addressed. Women scientists very often drop out of science due to maternity leaves and responsibilities connected to having a family. In most cases women are the ones who would give up their career to care for the children, even after the maternity leave. Even when female scientists want to go back to science after their maternity break they are already older than their male colleagues at the same career level that did not take any leaves from their professional development. Furthermore, many grants and scholarships introduced age limits as a condition to apply. In such cases women with children are already excluded and discriminated against if they took maternity breaks. Those kinds of restrictions make it even more difficult to progress in female scientific development and in reaching top-level positions in later career. The CMA VIU-GM’s intention is to change this situation and eliminate the age restriction for women with families, to the extent that the CMA is able. For women with children, we may allow some flexibility in work hours and in some cases create the part-time positions if so doing is not detrimental to the their work.

• Promotion of female scientists in the field of research, like special lectures given by female scientists during general CMA meetings and workshops and financial support for young PhD female scientists in promoting their lectures in top-level institutions of their choice (so called Promotional Lecture). The VIU-GM plans to help young unknown female scientists get better-known in the scientific world by financially supporting their travel and stay in scientific institutions of their choice, where they will be offered the possibility to present their achievements by giving presentations and lectures. This kind of action will also give the young female scientists the chance to build their own network and contacts which will benefit them in the future as their careers progress. The promotional lectures will be organized on a regular basis.

• The GE Action Plan anticipates organizing external activities, e.g. “Girls’ Days,” to provide better understanding of technically-oriented professions and advertising of materials science in schools (especially by young scientists). The planned school events should provide the opportunity to show girls other women who have advanced in their careers in materials science and encourage them to enter a field traditionally considered male-dominated.

• Organizing incentives that really fit the needs of female scientists, like short-term missions at the CMA partner institutions as well as presenting role models and visits to European laboratories headed by women – we need to give our young female scientific staff attainable goals at the next level. By presenting portraits of female professors’ career paths we want to show female scientists at the beginning of their careers women who successfully reached the top level positions in their careers. One of our goals is to organize visits and stays in European laboratories headed by women.

• Assisting female scientists in other areas beyond the laboratory, e.g. arranging child care facilities for CMA meetings, offering various courses in other fields, etc. The VIU-GM plans to offer young female scientists specific professional training courses on work /project management, personnel and conflict management, how to lead a scientific group, public relations, etc. Our trainings and workshops should make young female scientists fit for a leadership position. We need to help women assume more responsibility earlier so that they can be comfortable in leadership roles later.

• Exchange of experience: CMA-NoE consists of 19 institutions from 12 different countries which present a big variety of educational and legal systems, as well as traditions and national traits. Each of those countries has already experienced to a various extent the problem of imbalance in women’s presence at the top level scientific and management positions. Some of the institutions in different countries have already started projects to implement the gender equality. The VIU-GM will encourage the CMA participants to share their experience and present their project that have brought positive effects in their native countries.

• Last but not least, it is critical to raise awareness of gender equality issues among all the participants of the CMA project. The VIU-GM wants to make it clear that gender issues are important for both men and women. One of the VIU-GM objective is to create a structure within the CMA Network to promote excellence through mainstreaming gender equality and establish CMA as an example institution in this field.