How can research and innovation be gender inclusive without stereotyping?
24. August 2023
From July 5 to 7, 2023, the summer school "Breaking the Bias: Inspiring Diversity in R&I" took place in Athens, organized by Anita Thaler (IFZ) and Clemens Striebing (Fraunhofer) with dedicated international colleagues from the COST Action VOICES.
The interdisciplinary training was aimed at Master and PhD students as well as early career researchers working on the following three topics (incl. responsible trainers):
- health and biotechnology (Jelena Grahovac, Margarita Zachariou, Victoria Showunmi)
- digital technologies (Katerina Pastra, Vivian Stamou, Gul Kurtoglu Eskisar)
- climate, biodiversity & mobility (Ghadir Pourhashem, Clemens Striebing, Anita Thaler)
23 participants from 13 different countries attended the Summer School, as well as 9 trainers, the members of the organisation team and 6 lecturers, including Anne-Sophie Godfroy, COST Action coordinator, Elizabeth Pollitzer, founder of Gender Summit and none other than Londa Schiebinger, founder of the Gendered Innovation concept.
A highlight next to the dense content and diverse social programme was the presentation of the posters of participants, which were continuously improved and supplemented with gender and intersectionality aspects in the course of the summer school.
In this way, the learning successes of all participants were visible at a glance through the immediate application of the new gender knowledge to their own research. In the final evaluation by all participants, trainers, presenters and organizers, Kyriaki Savva Devriş İşler and Sara Larrabure won the most votes and thus the three "Best Poster Awards".
In the coming months, Anita Thaler and Clemens Striebing will work on strategies for the publication of the didactic concepts and summer school contents developed by the trainer team in the working group they lead on "Gender as Research Dimension".