Catalonia's Open University to coordinate new European gender equality in research center

The Gender and ICT group at the Open University of Catalonia (UOC) is now in charge of coordinating INSPIRE, a new EU-funded center of excellence for gender equality in research that will run for 48 months starting this October.

The project, which will see the Catalan higher education institution "help implement equality plans and promote innovative practices" alongside 13 other research centers and organizations, was awarded just under €5m in EU funds.

While slightly over half of all PhD students are women, they account for under a third of research professionals.

Women are also more likely to suffer job insecurity than men early on in their careers and "the gap becomes significantly magnified further up the academic ladder," a UOC press release reads.

Because of this, INSPIRE aims to "close the gender gap in the world of research and to make research more inclusive."

14 organizations

INSPIRE will involve a total of 14 organizations coordinated by UOC based on four knowledge and support hubs:

1. Intersectionality, with Belgium's Hasselt University and Spain's Notus applied social research center.
2. Fostering change in the private sector, with Germany's Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft research organization and Austria's Joanneum Research.
3. Widening participation, with Poland's Jagiellonian University, Slovenia’s Znanstveno Raziskovalni Centre and Argentina’s branch of Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences (FLACSO).
4. Maintaining sustainable change, with the University of Southern Denmark and The Netherland's Radboud University.

Hungary's Európa Média Szolgáltató Nonprofit,  Germany's GESIS-Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences, Portia, and Greece's Innosystems will also be participating. 

INSPIRE will also support 12 communities of practice from more than 95 institutions.