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About the website

This toolbox was developed to help leaders in academia at the department, faculty and top management levels to integrate work on equality and inclusion into their daily activities.This type of initiative involves:

  • Self-assessment of the work on gender equality and gender balance that has been carried out in the department or faculty.
  • Mapping of the gender balance situation in departments and faculties.
  • The development of local action plans for departments and faculties.
  • Evaluation of measures implemented in departments and faculties across the institution.

The described tools may help with current organisational changes at the institution. The tools can also be used as a starting point for discussions around new measures and raising awareness about the issues related to equality and gender balance at the institution.

As a political project, gender balance has concerned equal representation of the categories male and female. Even though not everyone is comfortable with defining themselves within these binary categories, we have for pragmatic reasons adapted this tool to this project. We believe that the work on improving the binary gender balance may contribute to increasing the threshold for other types of diversity, including gender diversity. Hence, the tool is beneficial in terms of improving the climate for diversity in a broader sense even though it breaks away from a more research-based and nuanced understanding of diversity.

This website is developed by the research group: Gender balance and diversity in higher education at the Department of Interdisciplinary Studies of Culture, NTNU: The Norwegian University of Science and Technology. It was developed by Ivana Suboticki, Vivian A. Lagesen, Siri Ø. Sørensen, Knut H. Sørensen and Martine Sletten. The work was funded by the Research Council of Norway’s Programme BALANSE and is a result from the research projects ‘Equality from below’ and ‘Understanding gender imbalances among university professors: the shaping and reshaping of epistemic living spaces (GENDIM)’.

The 'Balancinator' tool available under 'mapping' has been developed by Lilli and Matthias Mittner within the project 'Prestige. Gender Balance in Researc Leadership' at UiT The Arctic University of Norway.