On October 19 2022, Gender-SMART partners met in Brussels for the project’s final dissemination event. During the morning session entitled « Harvesting lessons learned: Inclusive Workplaces & Sustainable impact », partners discussed their best practices elaborated throughout the project together with external experts and the general public. The afternoon session was dedicated to the young generations to discuss the challenge of inclusion in the digital age through a round table organised in collaboration with the GEARING-Roles project. About 100 participants from different backgrounds participated (both online and in-person) in this successful event that took place on the wonderful premises of the Museum of Natural Sciences.
Gender-SMART FINAL CONFERENCE: Harvesting lessons learned: Inclusive Workplaces & Sustainable Impact
The aim was to share thoughts on the people, work, ideas, and commitments within our organisations with target groups (Sister institutes and stakeholders in the field of agriculture, food, and life sciences); good practices on institutionalizing and sustaining Gender Equality Action Plans for Research Performing and Research Funding Organisations (RPOs & RFOs); and pass on the experience gained to young potential change agents as the legacy of our project and inspire the next generation to put gender equity upfront and central in their work and life.
WATCH THE FINAL CONFERENCE
WATCH THE JOINT EVENT WITH GEARING-ROLES "BECOME A GENDER EQUALITY INSIDER"
SPEAKERS
Meet our speakers and panellists!
Marcela Linková PhD is the head of the Centre for Gender and Science at the Institute of Sociology of the Czech Academy of Sciences. She holds a doctorate in sociology from Charles University in Prague. Her research focuses on the sociology of gendered organizations, research careers, governance of research and research assessment as well as the analysis of public policies for gender equality in R&I. Between 2017 and 2021 she was the chair of the ERAC Standing Working Group on Gender in Research and Innovation and coordinator of the Horizon 2020 GENDERACTION project. Marcela currently coordinates Horizon Europe project GENDERACTIONplus focused on advancing gender equality policy in the European Research Area, and participates in Horizon 2020 Gender-SMART project as a technical partner providing external monitoring and evaluation, and two research projects UniSAFE and RESISTIRE, as well as in the now completed projects GE Academy and CASPER.
Dr Nadine Zakhia-Rozis is a food scientist at Cirad, specialised in the impact of processing on food quality and saftey. She has coordinated multiple european projects in partnership with different Latin American countries. She has taken on the scientific coordination of sustainable food systems in CIRAD and has been engaged in the management of scientific teams for 10 years. Presently, she is deputy director for research and strategy at CIRAD and coordinator of the Gender-SMART project
Athanasia Moungou. Policy officer at the Directorate General for Research and Innovation, working on gender equality policies in R&I. Before starting working at the European Commission, I was a researcher in the field of life sciences, which made me more interested in advancing gender equality in R&I, including integrating a gender dimension in R&I content.
Elisabeth Claverie de Saint Martin studied at France’s prestigious Ecole Normale Supérieure and Ecole Nationale d’Administration, and began her career as a researcher in microeconomics. She joined the Civil Service in 1993, and quickly began work under the direct authority of three French ministers (Finance, Research and Foreign Affairs), and for the Spanish government. In 2013, she was appointed Senior Advisor to the Executive Director for France at the World Bank and the IMF in Washington DC, where she worked to build and steer public development aid policy. In 2016, she returned to France and was appointed Deputy Director for sustainable development at the Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs Directorate General for Globalization, Culture, Education and International Development. This varied career has made her acutely sensitive to biodiversity and climate issues within the European and multilateral framework. Elisabeth Claverie de Saint Martin joined CIRAD in 2018, as Director General in charge of Research and Strategy, before being appointed CEO on 16 June 2021.
Dr. Maxime Forest is a Senior Consultant at Yellow Window and a senior lecturer and researcher at Sciences Po Paris. His expertise covers the comparative analysis of gender equality policies in Europe, notably in the fields of research and innovation. With Lut Mergaert, he co-authored the chapter on ‘Integrating Gender and Diversity’ for the SAGE Handbook of Research Management (2015) and based on his extensive experience as a gender trainer, he co-edited with Maria Bustelo and Lucy Ferguson The Politics of Feminist Knowledge Transfer: Gender Training and Gender Expertise (Palgrave, 2016). For Yellow Window, he has been involved lately in the Gender-SMART, GEECCO and Gearing-Roles projects.
She graduated from the Master's programme in Sociology at Masaryk University. She is working in the NKC within projects implementing gender equality in academia and research (GE Academy 2019 and 2021, Gender-SMART 2022). She is a sociologist at the Institute for Research on Inclusive Education at the Faculty of Education, Masaryk University, where she works on race, class and disability in education, as well as institutional care for children under three.
Maria is Research Director and co-owner at Smart Venice, a research and consultancy SME specializing on gender+, participatory and inclusive innovation. She has been the scientific coordinator of the H2020 Equal-IST and currently the CALIPER projects on institutional change and GEPs implementation, and has coordinated the Smart Venice team as a partner in the GE Academy and CASPER projects, focusing on capacity building on gender in R&I and certification systems for gender equal Research Organizations respectively. Maria has a MA in Philosophy and social sciences, a Phd In Cognitive and Learning studies, and a 20+ years working experience on gender equality issues, mainly through EU-funded collaborative action-research projects.
Christine Verschuur, an anthropologist, was faculty of the Geneva Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies - Geneva from 1996 to 2018, Department of Anthropology and Sociology and Gender Centre. She founded and directed the Pôle genre et développement of IHEID that became the Gender Centre. She directed the collection Cahiers Genre et Développement, a series of books published by L'Harmattan - Paris since 2000. At the Geneva Graduate Institute, she taught on feminist and development issues, contributed to the integration of gender in teaching, research and outreach and did research. Her latest research projects were on social reproduction, feminist solidarity economy and agroecology; and on gender experts and gender expertise. She has conducted research mainly in Latin America (Colombia, Brazil, Argentina) and Africa (Sahelian Africa and Mozambique). She has organised numerous international conferences on gender and development (around twenty between 1994 and 2018), building networks between the academic world, feminist and international organisations. She has published numerous books (30), articles or book chapters (50) on gender, feminisms and development issues.
Emma Fogarty is the Gender-SMART Project Co-ordinator for Teagasc, the Agriculture and Food Development Authority. She qualified as a lawyer in Ireland in 2006, having completed her LL.M masters degree in Public International Law at the University of Helsinki, Finland. She completed her masters thesis on; “Third Country Nationals in the European Union – the Importance of a Secure Legal Status in Furthering Integration”. Emma spent some time working and gaining legal experience in the Brussels office of the international law firm, Skadden, Arps LLP. After achieving her professional qualification, she worked for ten years in private legal practice representing the local authority on a wide range of issues. During this time, she co-founded the monthly Free Legal Advice Clinic (FLAC) in her home town of Wexford, Ireland for people that could not afford to pay for legal services. Emma joined Teagasc in 2018 and worked as a solicitor in the Corporate Services Department for four years before joining the GenderSMART project earlier this year. She is currently in the second year of the Teagasc Leadership Development Programme, which is being delivered by Dublin City University. Emma has been involved with the Law Society of Ireland since early 2021 in coordinating a support group for ten female Afghan judges who have been granted refugee status in Ireland.
Jean-Michel Sourisseau is economist at CIRAD (Centre de Coopération Internationale en Recherche Agronomique pour le Développement - France), and Deputy Director of the joint research unit "Actors, Resources and Territories for Development" (ART-Dev). He worked in New Caledonia, where he initiated a large survey on kanak tribes’ economy. Multifunctionality of agriculture and diversity of family farming are recurring themes he studies. He was responsible for coordinating CIRAD's scientific publication during the International Year of Family Farming (2014), and is CIRAD focal point on this theme. He participates actively to the UN decade of Family Farming, launched in Rome in April 2019. Currently, his research focuses on agriculture intensification pathways in the face of Sub-Saharan Africa demographic challenges in Mali, Senegal, Burkina Faso, as well as Madagascar, Togo and Benin. He is contributing to the European project Gender-SMART since 2019, notably as co-chair of the CIRAD community of practice to integrate gender in research projects.
Dr Margreet van der Burg, Wageningen University, NL
Margreet.vanderBurg@wur.nl
Dr. Margreet van der Burg is senior university lecturer/research Gender Studies at Wageningen University, the Netherlands since 2001. She examines food, agricultural and rural research, innovation and development from a gender perspective and also takes the gender dimension as also intersecting with other social dimensions (gender+ / intersectionality). Her work includes gender and the development of agricultural educational and knowledge systems, family farming, agriculture oriented organisations, as well as rural, agricultural and food iconography and heritage. She expanded her work from the Netherlands to the European/western level and the global level, both historical and contemporary. Within her position at Wageningen, in 2006 she also served as Rural Gender Studies Guest Professor in the Maria Goeppert-Mayer Professoriate Program from German Lower Saxony, at the Faculty of Agricultural Sciences, Goettingen, Germany. 10 years later she was visiting scholar with Carolyn Sachs, Professor in Rural Sociology and Women’s Studies at PennState University USA. Through the years, she engaged in many professional and outreach activities such as TV documentaries, travelling exhibitions, and conferences, professional networks and organisations. Recently she co-organized the 4-days online global conference ‘Cultivating Equality: Advancing Gender Research in Agriculture and Food Systems’, 12-15 Oct 2021. Currently, she is also daily project leader for her institution for EU Horizon 2020 Gender-SMART, no 824546, focusing on agriculture and life sciences, within the EU Science for and with Society programme (SwafS). In the project consortium she leads the work package for gender integration into education, research and funding. She is also gender co-expert for the Dutch NUFFIC Orange Knowledge Programme OKP-IRA-104278 PROJECT with 6 Iraq universities on Efficient Water Management in Iraq by Switching to Climate Smart Agriculture; and chair of the gender committee of the EU-Horizon -2020 project SPRINT, Programme for research & innovation no 862568 on Sustainable Plant Transition Research.
Panayiota Polykarpou holds a degree in Business and Public Administration from the University of Cyprus. Her interests focus on gender and equality, diversity and inclusion, and in 2020 she co-founded the first digital awareness campaign for gender equality in Cyprus called “Thkio Logia” and furthermore co-authored the book “A book about equality – A few words for a big change”. She firmly believes in the empowerment of young girls and in December 2021 she launched a new initiative in Cyprus called “Girls in STEAM Academy” which aims to inspire the next generation of women leaders in STEAM fields. Currently, she works at Cyprus University of Technology as Research Fellow & Project Manager of Gender-SMART.
Laia Tarragona is the technical coordinator and project manager of GEARING ROLES, and researcher at the University of Deusto, where she is also a member of the implementing team of the Gender Equality Plan. Coming from a legal background, she has broad experience in research project management, has also worked as an independent consultant on hate speech and counter-speech strategies, and was associate lawyer at an international law firm. In 2013, she was invited to participate in the International Visitor Leadership Programme (IVLP) promoted by the US Department of State. Her research interests include inequalities, gender, and migration.
Anna Koukkides-Procopiou works as a Consultant on the Turkey/Cyprus project of the Europe and Central Asia Programme of the International Crisis Group. She is a Senior Fellow and Member of the Advisory Board of the Cyprus Center for European and International Affairs, University of Nicosia. Her research and published academic work focusses on foreign policy, inclusive security and gender.
Carmen González holds a degree in Biology from the University of Extremadura. She began her professional career as assistant laboratory manager in a Nestlé factory and later joined as project manager in the area of Food Technology in the R&D Centre that the multinational had in Spain, carrying out her research activity in other centres of the company in Switzerland, Sweden, Germany, France and the United States. She then developed her activity in the Research Business Association Centro Tecnológico Nacional Agroalimentario Extremadura (CTAEX) as head of the Food Technology Area, coordinator of R&D Projects, deputy director and in 2011 she was appointed Technical Secretary General of the association and director of the centre. In 2015 she became General Manager of the Centre for Scientific and Tecnological Research of Extremadura, a public research centre of the regional government.
Elena Schubert is currently working for Unit B.3. in DG Agriculture and Rural Development – focusing on equality and non-discrimination issues in the capacity of Deputy Equality Coordinator for DG AGRI. Her other fields of responsibility include the social inclusion files, monitoring and analysis of the socio-economic situation of rural population. Since 2003, she has been working for the European Commission services primarily on social policies, equality and non-discrimination issues. Many years of experience in the European Structural and Investment funds, particularly the European Social Fund; She studies in the US, Slovakia and Germany, literature, social science and EU law;
Maroun El Moujabber is a Senior Officer at CIHEAM Bari since 2005. Previously was an associate professor in Lebanon and National Project Director of several FAO Projects on Protected Agriculture. At CIHEAM Bari he is coordinating a project on invasive pests in the Euro-Mediterranean area and has large experience on Joint Programming in food security and natural resources management in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. He is managing a Project on Gender Equality Plans and coordinating the Doctoral platform of our Institute. He is the President of the Scientific Advisory Committee of PRIMA.
Laurence Guyard has a PhD in sociology. Her main research has focused on gender issues in health and at work, on social mobility. She works at ANR since 2011 and is head of the relationship with the scientific communities, gender equality, scientific integrity delegate. She is a member of the national committee for monitoring equality action plans and represents the agency at Science Europe for the research culture axis. She recently graduated with a Master’s degree in Ethics, Sciences, Research and Society.
