A campaign to challenge stereotypes on “women” and “research”
During the last years, Eurodoc has increased its commitment to the advancement of Gender Equality in academia, along with drawing greater attention to diversity and inclusion. This year, we decided to give relevance to this topic with the support of the many women who are active within the Eurodoc community through a campaign named “Women in Research”. Symbolically, the campaign will run from the 11th of February, the International Day of Girls and Women in Science, to the 8th of March, the International Women’s Day.
In the last years, Eurodoc has reflected on how much the discourse to advance gender equality in research is built mostly within a broad framework of stereotypes on what women are, and what research is. Try searching the web for pictures of female researchers, and you will be met mostly by a portrayal of a woman with a microscope. However, we all know that not all research is done in a lab.
In Eurodoc we advocate for a fair and qualitative research assessment able to recognise and value the contribution of all research. Research is not, and should not be, a lonely job, it is done in collaboration. All researchers play an important role and rather than showcasing a few, risking biting into the “merit” and “excellence” rethorics, we want to show that research is done by many. Each researcher has a role in the advancement of human common knowledge, and for this reason, it is important to celebrate each one of them, at all career stages.
And last but definitely not least, in Eurodoc we believe that we, as researchers, have a responsibility to not only do high quality research, but also be active citizens who work on strengthening the role of research in society. The women in this campaign are not only researchers, they are also advocates for a more sustainable academia. They work to improve the conditions of early career researchers across Europe.
We encourage you to follow the campaign daily until the 8th of March when you will see the full extent of the campaign. By then, when you visit our Instagram account, you will be met by a wall of female researchers. This will show how great the variety of female researchers is. We do this by sharing the stories of the women who volunteer in Eurodoc or a member organisation of Eurodoc, in order to showcase how each one contributes in a significant way to research through their professional work and with their activism as advocates for better research.
Each one of the people you’ll meet during the campaign has a personal different background, a different vocation, a different experience of research, as scholars and as advocates. As we asked each participant to provide pictures of themselves and of their research work, this campaign will contribute to show this variety also on a visual level, to portray images of women and research different from the stereotyped one.
The campaign, in fact, is meant to show many types of role models, casting aside the “merit & excellence” criteria. They are excellent alone, but it is when brought together that they become extraordinary. The female researchers you will meet over the next weeks are people who care about research, who have experienced the difficulties of being an early career researcher, who have met injustices in academia, and are committed to improving research and the higher education system.
We believe that all early career researchers are role models one for the other, and we hope that the diversity that you will meet here can inspire many to pursue a career in research.
We’d also like to invite all of you to contribute further to this campaign, in different ways:
- If you are a woman active in research:
- we welcome you to join this campaign through your own social media accounts, by answering the following four questions:
- Who are you?
- What is your research about?
- Why did you go into research?
- Why did you join this campaign?
- Share picture of yourself and your research, tag @we_are_eurodoc and use the following hashtags: #WeAreEurodoc, #WomenInResearch, #Eurodoc, #DoctoralCandidates, #early_career_researchers
- If you don’t identify yourself as a female researcher or you don’t want to join the campaign directly, but want to support this common effort to find a different way to portray women in research:
- please help us to share the campaign
- ask other women to join the campaign to help us to collect stories and pictures as varied and inclusive as possible.
If you are interested in our advocacy activities, please follow us on our social media. If you recognise yourself as a non-binary and want to raise awareness of non-binary researchers in academia, please contact Sara Pilia.
Sara Pilia (Equality officer in Eurodoc) - 0000-0001-8221-3082
Pil Maria Saugmann (Secretariat Coordinator in Eurodoc) - 0000-0002-3548-0134
Anna Pavelieva (Communication Coordinator in Eurodoc) - 0000-0002-2306-1928
Sebastian Dahle (Vice-president of Eurodoc) - 0000-0001-7568-0483
Oleksandr Berezko (President of Eurodoc) - 0000-0002-0664-4339