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Gender-sensitive communication in research and academia: the SUPERA guidelines

By Paola Carboni, University of Cagliari

Great news! The SUPERA consortium has published the “Tailor-made guides for gender-sensitive communication in research and academia”. These guidelines have been developed with three main aims: raising awareness on the growing importance of communication and language in supporting the institutional change towards gender equality; increasing the awareness that gender biases and stereotypes affect communication on a daily basis and providing useful advice to support the adoption of a gender-sensitive approach in the communication of any academic institution.

These Guidelines are designed to be used by everyone in research performing and research funding organisations: while they are primarily tailored for the media specialists holding communication responsibilities, they will be useful as well for everyone involved in communication activities: administrative or technical staff, researchers, the student communities.

The concepts proposed are aligned with the framework of RRI – Responsible Research and Innovation, the H2020 “cross-cutting issue” that redefines the role of researchers in society and promotes an inclusive approach to research and innovation. More specifically, our theoretical approach is situated at the intersection among three domains: institutional communication, science communication and interpersonal communication. Each of them is relevant for the communication of a research institution and each of them can be gender-sensitive or – on the contrary – stereotyped and discriminating, even if not knowingly.

The work begins with the analysis of two main corpora: resources on gender-sensitive communication developed within the framework of the “sister” EU funded projects and guidelines on gender-sensitive communication already developed by international organizations and universities. On the one side, the sisters projects shared with us materials such as webinars, case studies, official agreements, developed in the last 10 years of EU-funded projects and covering different aspects of the communication field. On the other side, mapping the already existing guidelines has demonstrated that the need for guidance is high, among different kinds of institutions. The analysis has been hugely interesting and we have shared the complete list in the Appendix 2.

The SUPERA guidelines include also a glossary of the key terms of gender equality in research and academia, in order to allow any reader with no previous gender knowledge to access to a first set of information. Another chapter has been devoted to the analysis of the main resistances against gender-sensitive communication, that may be even very strong: everyone working in this field very soon becomes familiar with expressions such as: “Gender-sensitive communication is not a priority, you should focus on other things”!

The second part of the guidelines contains practical advice and opens with an overview of two main concepts to take into consideration when adopting a gender-sensitive communication perspective: gender stereotypes and visibility vs. omission. The majority of the mistakes regarding gender-sensitive communication could be reported to one of those two fields.

After that, the analysis developes under five main communication areas: gender-sensitive language, visual and graphics, events, digital communication and media relations. From the selection of words and images to the inclusive management of events; from the best policies to adopt in digital communication to a non-discriminatory management of the relations with the media: the SUPERA Guidelines tries to merge the advice of the most influential guidelines with our scientific knowledge and professional experience to provide the readers with a (hopefully) exhaustive set of advice.

The SUPERA Tailor-made guides on gender-sensitive communication in research and academia have been developed by the University of Cagliari team, composed by Barbara Barbieri, Paola Carboni, Ester Cois, Alessandro Lovari, Erika Sois, while the illustrations are by Giorgia Cadeddu. The document is available in our Resources section at this link.

You are welcome to translate and disseminate the guides in your institutions, under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license (CC BY-SA 4.0). A graphical template is also available as an Appendix.

Let us know what you think on Twitter or Instagram or at info@superaproject.eu!

Central European University’s progress with SUPERA

By Ana Belen Amil, Central European University. Ph: Zoltan Tuba

In the midst of the Coronavirus crisis, the CEU SUPERA team is working hard to ensure that gender equality goals continue to be a priority for the institution in its transition to Vienna. What is currently in our agenda?

. The SUPERA team together with the Senate Equal Opportunity Committee is in the laborious process of amending the CEU Policy on Harassment to address the problems that were identified during our Baseline Gender Equality Assessment conducted in 2018-2019. The main modifications are: 1. to create a Network of Ombudspersons who will receive intensive training to informally deal with harassment and sexual harassment complaints, with a survivor-centred approach; 2. to build an online platform that will streamline the complaint mechanism to make it more accessible to survivors; 3. to incorporate the option of submitting anonymous disclosures; 4. to create a reliable, centralised record-keeping system that will allow for monitoring; and 5. to develop appropriate training plans and awareness-raising sessions for the entire community.

. Together with the Institutional Research Office, the SUPERA team is putting together a comprehensive Handbook of Gender Sensitive Data Collection and Monitoring. Its main goal is to ensure that the necessary data for high-quality gender analysis is collected regularly by all relevant units, so regular monitoring exercises can be performed and evidence-based policies and actions to tackle inequalities can be developed. This Handbook is being developed with an intersectional lens, and uses a non-binary approach to gender.

. The move of most academic staff to the Vienna campus, and the concomitant need for new contracts, provides an excellent opportunity for the SUPERA team to run an in-depth analysis of Equal Pay for Equal Work at the faculty level within and across academic departments. This will guarantee that any gender imbalances found in the salaries of faculty are corrected and the University can have a fair start in Austria in this regard.

. Last but not least, the COVID-19 pandemic has brought to the surface deep rooted inequalities in our society, and this is also true for gender. With the whole family staying at home, and most children under home-schooling, the household chores became much heavier. All this unpaid reproductive labour falls mostly on the shoulders of women, not only because of social norms and expectations on gender roles but also due to the existing structure of the workforce. The SUPERA team, once again in collaboration with CEU’s Senate Equal Opportunity Committee, has redacted a memo asking the Senior Leadership Team to raise the attention of supervisors on this matter, together with some suggestions on how to navigate this situation, such as:

1. Prioritize tasks and distribute them taking caring responsibilities into consideration,
2. Make sure that team members with care responsibilities can work from home;
3. Allow for flexible worktimes so employees can better harmonize work with caring responsibilities at their best convenience,
4. Avoid allocating ad hoc tasks,
5. Develop clear timetables so employees know exactly what tasks are expected from them and for when,
6. For particularly overburdened colleagues, lower the workload (e.g. single parents, household with 3 or more children etc.).

The suggestion was very well received by the leadership and circulated immediately.