13.03.2019
Since the start of the TARGET project in May 2017, the consortium member Dia Anagnostou at the Hellenic Foundation for European and Foreign Policy (ELIAMEP), together with members from the Community of Practice (CoP), have sought to inform the ELIAMEP’s research and administrative personnel of the projects’ aims and goals, and to urge them to support it. A description of the TARGET project was uploaded on ELIAMEP’s website page.
In order to elicit the support and involvement of the Foundation’s top management, Anagnostou discussed with ELIAMEP’s Director and Deputy Director the goals and significance of the TARGET project at length. In November, the Deputy Director circulated an e-mail message to all ELIAMEP staff, with which she informed them about the development of a Gender Equality Plan (GEP) for ELIAMEP, in the frame of the TARGET project, and highlighted the need for their support to pursuing it. In December, Dia Anagnostou made a twenty-minute power point presentation of the TARGET project to the members of ELIAMEP’s Board of Directors.
On the basis of the audit that was conducted at ELIAMEP, a Gender Equality Plan (GEP) had been drafted and pre-approved by the Director. It demonstrates the value that the Foundation places on gender equality and inclusiveness, and assigns responsibility to its staff members to implement actions towards these goals.
Part of the design of the GEP was the identification and designation of a CoP that helps ELIAMEP building the institutional capacity for a reflexive gender equality policy. The CoP at ELIAMEP is composed of 10 individuals. One significant obstacle that could arise in maintaining an active CoP is the concern that some may have with the amount of time that their involvement in such a community requires.
At this stage the GEP is in the process of its final approval.
By implementing a set of concrete actions, this GEP initiates a longer-term process of organizational change. It sets objectives in three areas of organizational structure and practice:
(a) human resource management,
(b) decision-making
(c) gender in research content.
The challenges identified by the auditing of the human resource management at ELIAMEP concern the lack of systematic data collection. ELIAMEP does not regularly collect data related to employment, promotion and retention, and it does not collect any gender-disaggregated data either. Thus, such data and information are missing for the previous years, rendering it impossible to assess any pay differentials over time, or recruitment and promotion patterns related to gender.
Regard the second objective of the GEP, the audit showed that ELIAMEP does not have formalized policies regarding the gender composition in decision-making bodies in place or in the positions of senior and top-level staff. The apparent imbalance in the gender composition in the Board of Directors has, however, been informally discussed and the President and the Vice President of the BD are well-aware of it and willing to seek to redress it.
Lastly, with respect to the third objective, ELIAMEP shall promote more actively the incorporation of the gender dimension in the research projects that it implements.