Gender biasing currently permeates all life-domains, and claims for urgent need of interventions addressing strategic gender interests focus on fundamental issues related to women’s (or, less often, men’s) subordination and gender inequities. Strategic gender interests are long-term, usually not material, and are often related to structural changes in society regarding women’s status and equity. This is also the case of the Research Sector, in which women still systematically disappear from higher levels of academic hierarchy.

The R&I Peers partners are aware that the obstacles experienced by individuals and groups striving for self-development are often indirect and difficult to discern. They are caused by structural phenomena, social representations and personal and professional cultures that are often difficult to grasp and are particularly resistant to change.

The problems faced by research institutions can be summarised as: 

• Opaqueness in decision-making processes;
• Institutional practices inhibiting career opportunities:
• Unconscious bias in assessing excellence
• Wasted opportunities and cognitive errors in knowledge, technology and innovation;
• Employment policies and practices.

These problems are magnified in the Mediterranean Countries because of the cultural and welfare model, mainly based on the differentiation between the role of women (pivotal role as responsible of family caring) and men (“the breadwinner”). 

These are systemic difficulties and the R&I Project partners had chosen an approach that considers that gender-neutral policy should go hand in hand with gender-sensitive measures, thus ensuring effective equality of opportunities between men and women in science and technology and, therefore, complying with the “equality between men and women”, one of the founding principles of the European Union.

One of the project SDDP's in Rome can be accessed here:

https://www.futureworlds.eu/w/1/3/3f/R%26I_PEERS_SDD_Rome.pdf