"Gender Budgeting as an Instrument for Managing Scientific Organisations to Promote Equal Opportunities for Women and Men – With the Example of Universities" is the new project realized by four partners: Frauenakademie München e.V., Sozialwissenschaftliches Institut München, Department of Economics / Institute for Institutional and Heterodox Economics and Network East-West Women (NEWW) -Poland.

Our SSA (SPECIFIC SUPPORT ACTION) aims at the development of tools/instruments to implement gender budgeting as an important part of budget planning in science. With the example of universities we want to extrapolate the findings to contribute to a gender watch system.

In the SSA, three countries Austria, Germany and Poland, work closely together. This allows a transnational as well as an interdisciplinary approach referring to the methods used in the SSA as well as referring to the participants of the team. As all countries are at a different level of organizational development and at a different level of implementing gender mainstreaming and gender budgeting in science the comparison will enable us to develop valid results.

In respect to the team there are experts from political science, economy, sociology, humanities and engineering. With the interdisciplinarity of the team we are able to look at our goal from various perspectives and have a broader awareness for risks as well as chances in respect to gender budgeting in science.

Due to our project objectives we will use qualitative and quantitative methods. Among others there will be document analyses, expert interviews, participative observations, communicative validations and statistical data analyses. With these we will be able not only to understand the obvious but also the processes which are fundamental if we want to find connecting points for gender budgeting in science.

We will start our SSA with an analysis of the national frameworks at universities, an analysis of the process of budget planning and an analysis of the actual situation at one university in each country. On the basis of the findings we will develop tools/instruments to adapt gender to the budgeting of scientific organizations and formulate recommendations for gender budgeting in science on national and EU level.

The main objective of the proposed project is to contribute to the promotion of gender equality in science in the European Union by developing gender budgeting instruments in science. The main focus of gender budgeting is the transfer of gender mainstreaming to budget policy and to the process of controlling budgets. The term gender budgeting is therefore in use for discussing the effects of public budgets with respect to equal opportunities for women and men (Gender Impact Analysis) and is also in use with respect to a gender sensitive budgeting process. Even so the basic ideas are widely known, operational instruments are hardly developed yet.

The proposed project will focus on universities for various reasons. Universities play an important role in the research area because most research in Europe is done at universities and most EU research funding goes to universities. Since universities are in charge to educate the new generation of academics they are particularly important to develop the human resources of female academics to reach a gender balance. The national situation is also reflected on EU level. Additionally, universities as public institutions have to be examples for the private sector and have to account to national or regional parliaments.

The analysis of the budgeting process in three different countries aims at the question of how the budgeting process works in scientific organisations. After a comparison of the process in all three countries we will be able to answer the question in which part or parts of the process gender budgeting must be implemented to achieve a gender responsive budgeting in universities.

Website of the project:   www.frauenakademie.de

Zofia Łapniewska:  zofia@neww.org.pl
Małgorzata Tarasiewicz:  tarasiewicz@neww.org.pl

»Frauenakademie München e.V.
»SIM Sozialwissenschaftliches Institut München
»The Network of East West-Women - Polska
»Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration