The Gender Academy
About this good practice
GA offers tools to improve innovation, competence supply, organizational structure and culture for companies in order to become more attractive and competitive.
Resources needed
The project had funding through the Academy for smart specialisation and ERDF to a total project budget of 940 000 euro including the staff costs for researchers and gender equality work experts. It also required involvement of specific companies, their time and dedication.
Evidence of success
The companies having gone through the Gender Academy process feel that equality is discussed among the company's leaders, managers and employees and that the insights into exclusionary norms in the company has increased. As a result some companies have started to include gender equality in employee surveys and employee interviews, changed their recruitment processes, changed the physical work environment and also included gender equality in the performance of customer assignments.
Potential for learning or transfer
The Gender Academy as a project is part of a long-standing tradition at Center for gender studies at Karlstad University collaborating with both public institutions and private businesses around issues like organizational change, gender mainstreaming and other kinds of gender equality work. This project like previous ones contributes to learnings and knowledge transfer across different sectors in the Värmland region.
However the Gender Academy has not only made an impact in the Värmland region. Several of the partners in the Debuting-project have shown great interest in the work done in the Gender Academy and have already arranged meetings and workshops with stakeholders in their region to discuss how they can set up similar projects. It is clear that it is the focus on the companies´needs and the more qualitative approach investigating how norms affect the individual company´s business that are part of creating that interest.