Changing the institutional culture and raising awareness of staff members

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An effective action and simultaneously an instrument for the realisation of other actions in our action plan is the IFZ Gender Report. As an action it aims at changing the institutional culture and raising awareness of staff members in regard to gender equality. It serves as an internal monitoring tool that is presented to all staff members in written and oral form once a year. This way they get insight into statistical data in figures and graphs indicating how gender equality is evolving throughout time. This year’s presentation of the IFZ Gender Report was embedded in an awareness raising workshop on the project GenderTime for all employees. The report as well as the minutes of the workshop has been made accessible to all employees on the intranet of the organisation.

The IFZ Gender Report does not only depict the situation of the past year but comprises data going back as far as 2005 and thus allows a retrospective and concomitant analysis of efforts to increase gender equality at IFZ. Experience from this first workshop in February 2014 proves that figures and statistical data are especially effective in raising the awareness for inequalities persistent at IFZ. Awareness leads to acceptance for further necessary actions to improve gender equality. One example of structural inequality with a wide range of consequences visualised in the IFZ Gender Report is the gender imbalance among staff members in tenure track positions and third party funded positions. The latter depend on the success in project acquisition and are constantly threatened to lose their job whereas the tenure track positions are relatively unconcerned by project funding. Currently the majority of tenure track positions are occupied by men. As a consequence it is crucial to focus on recruitment and career development policies to be implemented according to the IFZ action plan.