ACT!  

Clarify and adapt your GEPs to ensure that they are tailored to meet the organisations’ prevailing context, to fill the identified gaps, and to define realistic and measurable targets and indicators.

Review the progress achieved

• Every year a review of the progress achieved should be carried out by the implementation teams at each institution.
• Review Reports, covering activities implemented at an institutional and Faculty/School/Department level, should be disseminated within and across the institutions. Further advice can be sought from Expert Groups and External Advisers, to enable the revision of the GEP if necessary. The findings should be presented to senior management teams, so that lessons learned can be assessed at institutional level.

Through discussions and constant feedback from implementation team and Experts, you will be able to review the GEP and reconsider the efficiency of each of your actions.

Share knowledge and good practice.

Dissemination Strategy Matters

Make your results known and accessible to specific target audiences and stakeholders, through clear and specific messages and within an agreed timeframe.

Aims

• Create a virtuous cycle of influence
• Make results more sustainable
• Maximise the impact of results
• Optimise investment and use of resources
• Improve reporting and monitoring systems
• Pool knowledge across functional areas
• Feed back into policy-making

Build materials to be hosted in a website for massive dissemination.

SAGE materials to be massively disseminated:

What is the MOOC?

• It is a composite, targeted course package for dissemination and exploitation within institutions throughout Europe and globally, who wish to advance gender equality.
• It is a synthesis of the course components designed by SAGE partners.
• It allows streamlining of the collected course materials.
• It is available publicly online.

Disseminate your results at both institutional and national levels

• Local dissemination of paper-based materials can be efficient (e.g. posters, leaflets, factsheets). Internet-based dissemination is also useful, through a website or webpage on the University or Research institution’s website.
• National level dissemination will need to be internet-based, as well as through participation at events such as workshops/public lectures.

Examples from SAGE partners:

• Here the presentation of the Charter of Principles hosted in ISCTE-IUL website
• Here the ISCTE Gender Equality Plan hosted in ISCTE-IUL website

Throughout the SAGE project’s life, partners have learned lessons and discovered opportunities for improvement.

Why Lessons Learned?

• Lessons Learned provide guides and learning points for future actionable recommendations through.
• Allowing discussion of actions that might have been done differently, root causes of problems that occurred and ways to avoid those problems in later project stages.

Some SAGE Lessons Learned

• Avoid gender binaries to address intersectional diversity.
• Actions must be: data-driven and designed to be gender-neutral – not for women only; tailored to the micro or macro environment in which they operate; and strategically designed to align with the institution’s core values.
• Implementation teams should include junior/senior staff, academic/non-academic staff and all genders.
• Involve men as champions/active participants in the transformational change process, as well as to have gender balance on all teams.
• Hold social events as well as functional meetings.
• Benchmarking against ‘Good Practice’ Institutions.
• Apply an active communication strategy, to communicate on the actions and their benefits, to the widest possible community of stakeholders.
• Systematize regular meetings and ongoing communication.
• Ensure support from top level: Commitment by Senior management.
• Work with key allies (e.g. Human Resources and Equality/Diversity offices) to influence gender-related policy.
• Identify support but be prepared for some resistance.
• Pay attention to the “unintended consequences”, since a measure that could seem beneficial for a portion of the target group may not be for other groups.
• Make use of, and extend, existing training/development opportunities.
• Prioritise Unconscious Bias Training.
• Focus on achievable actions in the short term to maintain momentum, while working on long term ones.
• Respond to the local context and specific needs by acting at both institutional and sub-cultural levels.