Gender Equality and the EU: the Gender Equality Awards 2025

INSPIRE visited the EC Gender Equality Champion Awards this week. In their fourth year, these awards recognise the work of institutions and networks in seeking gender equality in all aspects of their activities.  The ceremony provided an opportunity to hear about the gender work of the four winning groups – Gdansk University, Poland; the Royal College of Surgeons of Ireland (RCSI); the Spanish National Research Council; and Instruct-ERIC, a European research network in structural biology.

The Gender Equality Champion Awards is an initiative of the Commission's aimed at celebrating the results achieved by European academic and research organisations through the implementation of Gender Equality Plans, and serves as an incentive to advance inclusive gender equality plans and policies in the framework of the new European Research Area. This award recognises organisations that have developed the most innovative and inclusive gender equality plans addressing intersections with other social categories such as ethnicity, social origin, sexual orientation and gender identity (LGBTI+) or disability. 

Discussions at the awards helped us to think about some of the  opportunities and challenges of seeking gender equality. Opportunities include the necessity of flexible and inclusive organisational policies to enable women to contribute effectively.  A key challenge centres on the importance of male champions willing to support gender equality initiatives and policies.

Lessons for INSPIRE and Horizon Europe include shaping organisational policy and tracking progress through the collection of equality data on gender identity, disability, ethnicity, civil status and family status. We also learned that so-called ‘small’ actions can make a significant difference, such as the visibility of diversity and gender equality actions in organisations’ publicity. For example, one of the winning organisations – a medical university - found that advertising its activities using gender- and ethnically inclusive imagery helped to encourage participation by women from ethnic minorities.