Gender Equality Plan

1. Executive Summary

The CSI Center for Social Innovation, committed to promoting gender equality and balance in its working environment, has developed this declaration of a Gender Equality Plan (GEP) in furthering its efforts of improving working conditions, career opportunities and prospects as well as development for all its members of staff.

Through the development of GEP and other relevant initiatives, the CSI Center for Social Innovation is engaged in an ongoing process of improving its practices concerning gender equality and eliminating any procedures within the company that may lead into conditions of inequality between genders.

2. Gender Equality Plan (GEP)

2.1 Developing a GEP: mandatory and recommended building blocks

A GEP is a set of commitments and actions that aim to promote gender equality in an organisation through a process of structural change (European Commission, 2021). GEPs aim to promote gender equality through the sustainable transformation of organisational processes, cultures and structures that produce and sustain gender imbalances and inequalities. GEPs should address not only an organisation’s visible structure and practices (such as policies and procedures) but also consider how to evolve espoused values (what people say they believe) and underlying assumptions (unconscious beliefs, thoughts, and feelings), including in the production of knowledge and its applications.

The development of a GEP is underpinned by certain essential elements – or “building blocks” – which it must include.

The present declaration of GEP covers two sets of such building blocks:

Mandatory process-based elements: these represent standard minimum components of action plans to promote gender equality.
Recommended content-related elements: these are key gender equality issues that a GEP for Higher Educational Institutions (public & private) should seek to address.

The building blocks for the present GEP are shaped by the eligibility criterion of Horizon Europe GEP for R&I organisations (specific details are outlined in Box 1 below). This eligibility criterion proposed by the European Commission has been developed with the inputs of a wide array of national and institutional stakeholders and gender equality experts and build on the results of different EU-funded projects and initiatives. As such, they represent the results of a shared consensus on the key minimum components needed for achieving sustainable organisational change. The building blocks provide a framework for understanding gender inequality in R&I, setting aims and objectives and taking effective action to achieve them. The inclusive GEP will also consider how gender inequality interacts with other forms of discrimination based on, for example, ethnicity, disability, sexual orientation or social origin, and the policies and practices an organisation has in place to address them.

Box 1: