The 3rd Stakeholder Committee (StC) meeting, which took place on May 6th 2021, was attended by almost all members of the StC. Representatives from in total seven different national research funding organisations (RFOs) in Europe (among them all core-RFOs of the GRANteD project) as well as representatives from stakeholder organisations, the European University Association and Science Europe took part at the virtual meeting.
The aim of the 3rd StC meeting was to present
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- preliminary findings from the applicant survey, which was launched in December 2020 for the applicants of the International Postdoc Grant autumn 2020 call of the Swedish Research Council (SRC), as well as
- preliminary findings from the gender equality policy analysis of the five core-RFOS
and to discuss with the stakeholders the implications of these findings for their work.
Discussions focused on different grant allocation practices and the potential risk of the emergence of conscious and unconscious gender bias in decision-making processes. The stakeholders identified as main potential risks among others unstructured and not transparent evaluation systems, lack of monitoring systems and programme evaluations and therefore no follow-up statistics as well as not well-defined and established selection criteria for reviewers and panellists. They mentioned also the great importance of raising the awareness regarding various forms of gender inequalities among decision makers and stated the formulation of calls should address women more explicitly. The effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on practices of the decision-making process, application behaviour and selection process of reviewers and panellists were also central to the discussions. The discussions helped the GRANteD consortium to further fine-tune their data collection instruments (such as the applicant survey). Finally, the meeting also focused on the new requirement in Horizon Europe regarding the mandatory implementation of gender equality plans for funding.
