Gender Diversity: Breaking the glass-ceiling and getting to the top of companies

Terms like gender equality, gender diversity or quota of women are often discussed, but what is done in order to achieve gender equality?

GenDiv (Collaborative Learning for Gender Diversity in Decision Making Positions) is the only European project of the 2013/2014 LLP funding period focussing on gender diversity. The project wants to promote competences for and the access to top management positions for women.   

 

Linked to that is the search for company and management cultures which 

• offer alternative opportunities beyond the supposedly “proven” ways on climbing the career ladder,
• create fair chances for both, women and men and
• handle issues regarding the compatibility of work and family life with sensitivity.

With GenDiv we support a cooperative and mutual exchange and learning process between men and women as well as improving conditions, management cultures and measures for gender equality in companies. We do that by developing a specific qualification programme for female high-potentials and guidelines as well as recommendations for gender diversity in management committees.

The project started its activities with a survey on the status of women’s empowerment for decision-making positions. This was accompanied by personal interviews with men on policies and experiences with women’s empowerment for decision-making positions. Focus groups with women and men also discussed strategies for a reconciliation of work and family and measurements to further recognize and integrate men in gender equality actions in the management. The results of this research study will be published in a final summary report at the beginning of 2015.

Gender Diversity – Who does it affect? 

Discussions on gender diversity very often focus on the female perspective. To perceive positive change within gender inequality both, men and women have to be addressed on every level and in every sphere of society. Therefore, gender diversity concerns everybody. With this in mind the project consortium follows a gender integrative, participatory approach and brings together both genders during development and implementation.

With respect to quality assurance a selected group of management staff and high-potentials from leading national and international organisations meets regularly in each of the partner countries in order to exchange relevant questions of leading competencies and management responsibility, and give input and feedback to project results.

You are invited

• to visit our project website www.gendiv.eu,  
• to share your best practice experiences in terms of successful gender diversity measures of companies with us and
•  to subscribe to the GenDiv newsletter.

Contact us: Franziska Steffen, E-Mail:  f.steffen@dieberater.com

GenDiv is a Eurpean project funded by the LLP Programm of the European Commission.

Conference on ICT Skills for girls!

On Ocotober 15th a conference on promoting entrepreneurship among secondary school girls through ICT will be held in Antwerpen, Belgium.   

Online participation possible!  

You can attend all talks, interact with presenters, send your comments and questions live, and engage with all participants through online tools.

If you are interested and want to participate, don't forget to register as soon as possible. Click on this form to register.  

What do you need to be able to connect to the online conference? A computer with speakers, internet access and a browser (Chrome or Mozilla Firefox are recommended).   

This conference is beeing organised within the EU Project ICT-Go-Girls!. The project offers advice on resources and methodologies for implementing lessons to link the beliefs of young girls regarding their professional future and the real work environment. It is based on role models and exercises that encourage young girls to work in the ICT-sector or to become entrepreneurs.   

The ICT-Go-Girls! activities provide teachers with a wide range of ideas for implementation that can be tailored to suit different classroom settings. It builds upon the skills of young girls while allowing more in-depth thought about professional options. It is based upon their psychological and physical needs including performance indicators within the classroom.

ICT-Go-Girls! does not only allow young girls to reflect on their professional future but also promotes deeper thought and the development of essential skills, attitudes and knowledge concerning decision-making processes with regard to professional choices.  


-This project has been funded with support from the European Commission. This publication reflects the views only of the author, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.-

Active Ageing: A paradigm shift in todays society

Population is not only becoming older, but people are also staying active longer. With this change, the needs of senior citizens have changed as well. But what is it that they want or need? They want to participate in social life be part of the society and stay in charge of their own lives - just like every other citizen.

With this in mind, the European Project „Peer to Peer Support“ (PPS) conducted a survey asking senior citizens a bunch of questions concerning how further education for senior citizens could meet their need. This survey shows that 67 percent of the participating seniors are interested in training courses on active ageing. 39 percent of them are especially interested in the possibilities of earning money during retirement. 32 percent want to know more about mental health and another 32 percent are interested in using technology. The PPS training will be developed until the end of 2014 on the basis of these survey results with experts in public health and seniors themselves.

In Spring 2015 a training on “Active Ageing” will be held in Vienna for seniors between 55 and 75 years of age, just before retirement or after retirement, who want to discuss and learn more about topics of active ageing, such as participation in social life, health, mobility, and other topics. The training is being developed within the European project “Peer to Peer Support” (PPS) “.

Peer Learning as a cooperative learning model – The PPS project is based on peer learning, within knowledge and experience are passed on by trainers of the same age or in similar life situations as participants. The training is therefore conducted by older peers with support of the project team.

If you are interested in taking part in the training „Active Ageing“ or if you want to be informed about the development of the training, then contact us:

Dr. Katharina Resch

Tel: +43 1 5324545 - 1156

E-Mail:  k.resch@dieberater.com

PPS has been funded with support from the European Commission. This communication reflects the views only of the authors , and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained theirein. 

Project Sustainability - What's the problem?

Your projects are not made of deliverables.  They are made of sweat and blood and tears, of tight deadlines, late nights, sleepless nights – no nights – of budget air-travel, unwashed taxi-drivers and bad hotel breakfasts, a pantomime on the European stage, monitored and observed by a critical audience of unqualified critics.

If it’s not for the deliverables, then what is it for?

Think about this.  Think about how much of your working life you waste working on projects with no lasting results.  How many hours have you spent slogging away on project deliverables that are never going to reach their target audience once that final cheque has cashed?  How many minutes each day could be better spent making a real difference in your sector, that you are dwindling away appeasing European bureaucrats?

This is not the land of efficient goal-focused project-management, this is a cyclical race track of time and money, a rabid dog chasing its tail all the way to Brussels, leaving a carbon footprint in its tracks.

Sustainability.  The great word.  

Yes, we need to write something here.  We need to have a plan.  Maybe they like the sound of this.  Then we can look proudly over our ceremonially-stamped intellectual property-rights agreements, feeling smug as we bang the last nail into the cash register.

This, I believe is not what you want to have in mind when you cast your mind back over your professional career.  All those great things you left unaccomplished.  All those lives you never changed.  All the dust you gathered on the fruits of your labour, those fruits that so very easily could have been something else, something spectacular, something almost meaningful.

We believe in sustainability.  

We believe in long-term impacts.  We believe in value for the European tax payer.  Not just value for today, but for tomorrow and the days that follow.  We want to help you to discover sustainability and find ways to make the impact of your work go further and last longer.

Be part of the sustainability revolution 

– these are the fruits of your labour – let’s make them count.

You want to talk more about the sustainability of your projects then conctact Paul Talbot from die Berater® p.talbot@dieberater.com 

Open Registration for Conference on Youth Unemployment in London, September 11th

Registration is now open for the conference 'Bridging the Culture Clash between Employers, Youth People and Local Cultures' on the 11th September at the Osmani Centre in Whitechapel, London, which is free and open to anyone (subject to numbers) with an interest in this area.

The conference is the final event of 'Big Bang', an international project funded by the European Union's Lifelong Learning programme, which has been exploring the extent to which mismatches between the 'culture clash' of work, school and 'local or street' culture is one factor amongst many that are contributing to long-term youth unemployment across Europe.
To register click here.

The conference will start with an informal lunch and networking, and will hear from examples of relevant work in the UK, the Netherlands, Austria and Iceland. Presentations will include those from:
- Illias El Hadioui of Erasmus University, whose work was one of the original inspirations behind the project, is a published author from the Netherlands . He has written and spoken extensively on the relationship - and the mismatch - between the 'street culture' of young people and the norms of school and college culture. He will present a theoretical framework that he has developed  to describe this manifestation and highlight the experience of urban youth in large multi-ethnic urban conurbations in the Netherlands.

- Steve Rawlings of Building Lives Training Academies in East London has developed a number of successful apprenticeships in the construction industry, which have been featured in the Evening Standard. He will present a number of case studies and talk about working to bring young people and employers together.



Young people from Big Bang partner 15billion at one of their recent employability workshops.

The conference will consider the challenges of a 'lost generation' which has emerged since the Financial Crisis of 2008 in that whilst unemployment in general has increased internationally, these increases have been disproportionately high amongst young people.  This is a global phenomenon and has been the subject of much discussion as to the causes and solutions - such as that in a recent commentary published by Demos.