SPEAR · Supporting and Implementing Plans for Gender Equality in Academia and Research

SPEAR will initiate institutional change in nine European research performing organizations (RPOs) by implementing gender equality plans. Despite numerous EU-wide projects aimed at improving gender equality (GE) in academia, challenges persist, and GE practitioners and change agents experience fatigue and lack of support structures. SPEAR offers supportive structures through its interconnected Community of Learning (CoL) and Community of Practice (CoP). CoL will provide learning platforms while CoP provides an arena for experience exchanges. Both are crucial to successful and sustainable implementation of gender equality plans (GEPs), a key instrument to improving GE. SPEAR’s central objective is to support and implement GEPs, based on a step-by-step guide to GEP implementation devised by the European Institute for Gender Equality, through following a methodological path committed to creative, open, mitigating, processual, accountable, SMART and sustainable changes (SPEAR’s COMPASS). Integral to SPEAR’s project design is an enhanced impartial evaluation scheme to boost the feedback and learning of participants throughout the project. SPEAR employs strategic dissemination to boost its central sustainability commitment during and after SPEAR. SPEAR’s consortium numbers eleven partners, three of which have some experience with GE work while six have little or no experience. The first three will coordinate sessions during CoL and provide crucial support and best-practice guidance during structured interactions in CoP. Two task partners handle evaluation and dissemination. An advisory group representing key GE-stakeholders is affiliated. SPEAR aims to foster sustainability in GE-practices in academia through a range of measures and outcomes, including ties to other EU-based GE projects, network and community building within and beyond SPEAR, and formulation of practicable policy recommendations.