Support actions Knowledge Transfer to Universities to Support Gender Budgeting as an Instrument to Promote Equal Opportunities for Women and Men

The last part of the project (Knowledge transfer to universities in order to support Gender Budgeting as an instrument for the promotion of Equal Opportunities for women and men - WP 13) is the core of our project as here we intend to transfer our scientific findings on budgets at universities into specific support actions for the universities to advance the implementation of Gender Budgeting. This Work Package shows clearly the state of awareness of the particular universities and their willingness to allow external experts to support them in the often very delicate matters of budgeting. This can be seen as an indicator for the transparency of the budgeting process within each of these organisations, and a transparent budgeting process is a precondition for a successful Gender Budgeting.

And indeed this turned out to be the crucial point. The more open and transparent the distribution of money is, the more democratic seems to be the whole structure of the university management. We were able to demonstrate that the willingness, even just to discuss a Gender Budgeting issues, depends widely on the organisational culture of informational transparency. Accordingly the three national research teams had had different levels of access to data and information during the research process and had varying success to introduce Gender Budgeting proposals to the universities.

The fact that changes in structural budgeting matters are processes that take more time than the schedule of the project allowed, turned out to be a fundamental point. Another important result was that none of the research teams was allowed to participate in any crucial activities or negotiations concerning changing modes of budgeting or financing matters to the extent we would have thought reasonable and necessary. The German team came very close and the stakeholders for equality and budgeting showed quite a high interest in getting advice on how to improve the incentive system or how to implement gender-fair performance criteria into the cost-performance-equation. They were willing to let the project team participate in the negotiations but then again there was not enough time to accompany the processes to a successful end.

A main focus of the SSA was on the "Development of Instruments" for the implementation of Gender Budgeting. In the evaluation these are described in a condensed form. The SSA was especially interesting because all three nations had very different starting positions for the subsequent Support Actions and Knowledge Transfer to the universities in order to support the advancement of gender equality in science with the help of Gender Budgeting. Accordingly the possibilities for and the assessment to the support actions were very different. Nevertheless it can be stated that all three nations had similar experiences. One fundamental one was that there still is a striking lack of gender competence in the management of the universities. And it can be assumed that this is true not only for the three universities cooperating within this project.



 

For further information please contact the coordinator:

Frauenakademie München e.V. (FAM)
Baaderstr. 3
80469 München
Tel: ++49 (0) 89-7211881
Fax: ++ 49 (0) 89-7213830
info@frauenakademie.de www.frauenakademie.de

Dr. Andrea Rothe
Tel: ++49 (0) 170 - 89 13 624
info@andrea-rothe.de