ENGENDERING STEM Project Across the European Union there is a widening skills and employment gap in the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) sector. However, female participation in the labour market is consistently low across the region. In order to develop a skilled STEM workforce to meet industrial demands, it is necessary to increase and engage the female population by overcoming perceived and/or realised barriers to entry. A key aspect of achieving this involves empowering employers and educators to make positive changes to their workplace environments and practices with a view to creating a more inclusive and attractive sector. The aim of the ENGENDERING STEM project was to identify the factors that distinguish between small to medium sized (SMEs) STEM employers that have embraced equality and diversity in the workplace and those who have not. Specifically, the project aimed to identify the interventional strategies that have proven to be most effective for improving gender equality in organisations at various stages of engagement. In order to achieve this, we developed a Self-Assessment Toolkit and best practice guides for increasing gender equality engagement that then led to the development and delivery of a bespoke blended learning training programme. The project aimed to positively impact on the flow of female recruits into (and through) the STEM sector pipeline, with a focus on SMEs, and to support unbiased recruitment and retention processes to be mainstreamed into employment and education sectors. It also provided educational resources for participants to improve their awareness and understandings of key issues through engagement in relevant, specific programmes with currency within the sector. This approach was proposed in response to an established need for low or no cost flexible educational content. In order to address these key issues the project delivered three key outputs: • Publication of Gender Equality Research and Associated Best Practice Guides • Online Self-Assessment Gender Equality Diagnostic Toolkit • Blended Learning Training Programme Application of these outputs led to the realisation of the project objectives: 1. Improved stakeholder knowledge and awareness of gender equality issues within the STEM sector by enrolling 1,191 participants onto a bespoke training programme. 2. Engaged 2,587 stakeholders in web based activity over the lifespan of the project including website access, social media interactions, engagement with best practice guides and other project outputs. 3. Supported 56 SME employers in using the Gender Equality Self-Assessment Diagnostic Toolkit to assess their progress with respect to recruitment, retention and advancement policies and practice, and produce a bespoke assessment report that is tailored to their individual needs.The 4th objective: 4. To increase the average number of females recruited by participating employers by 10% (relative to baseline) by the end of the project.This proved difficult to measure but 47% of the participating employers increased the number of women in their organisaions. The project partners were City of Glasgow College (Scotland), VHTO (Netherlands), Miguel Altuna Instituta (Spain) and EQUATE Scotland (Scotland). All project partners were chosen in response to a demonstrated track record of promoting gender equality within the STEM and associated sectors as well as experience of working in large externally funded collaborative projects. Participants were primarily drawn from the employer networks of participating organisations although additional employers were engaged by the project team throughout the lifespan of the project. Additional participants included educators, policy makers, employer representatives, third sector and charitable workers and young people. Aspiring and current female STEM professionals are considered indirect participants as they will benefit from improved workplace practices as a result of employer and educator engagement with the project. The ENGENDERING STEM project aligned to the horizontal priorities; • Social inclusion; and • Open and innovative practices in a digital era It also mapped to a range of supporting EU policies, frameworks and agendas including Europe 2020, ET 2020, Erasmus+, Riga Conclusions, Yerevan Communiqué, EU Skills Agenda and a number of local education and labour market policies and strategies. The longer term sustainability of the project will be ensured through the development of employer/educator/research networks and integration of project outputs into project partners core functions.

"Mind the GAP! was a successful two-year EU project created to address the disturbing – and ongoing – shortfall of women training and working in STEM (science, technology, engineering and maths). It was run as an effective consortium of five partners from the United Kingdom, Netherlands and Spain. All partners had expertise and experience in vocational STEM training or gender diversity issues. When the project began, it was estimated that 1,300 million people with technical skills would be needed for jobs in the STEM sector by 2020. At the same time, figures showed that there were not enough STEM graduates – male and female - to fill these vacancies. Policy makers within the EU had recently called for more to be done to attract students to this area. To further compound this, statistics showed that women were grossly underrepresented in STEM careers and training. For example, a report by the WISE Campaign in 2012 showed that, ""While a few (mainly ex-Soviet) countries have around 20% women in STEM, Western European countries such as France and Spain (17% each), Denmark (16%), Germany (15%), Finland (15%), and UK (9%) all bring the European average down to 17%"". Women made up almost half the labour market (46% of the workforce in the UK), so we recognised that encouraging and retaining more girls in STEM subjects after compulsory education was crucial for tackling the problem.Mind the GAP! was created in this context and aspired to help: - Fill the STEM skills shortage by inspiring more girls to stay in training and vocational education in order to gain STEM qualifications. - Combat high levels of early drop-out rates and youth unemployment by raising aspirations amongst young women. - Improve gender diversity in STEM by raising awareness of the current skills gap. We worked directly with: - STEM teachers at vocational colleges and schools- Female students, aged 16–18, and studying STEMand indirectly with: - Younger girls in secondary schools - Teachers and key staff in other subjects - Key decision makers and stakeholders - Organisations working in gender diversity and STEM The project kicked off by running focus groups with both teachers and female students in order to create a realistic and useful needs analysis. Based on this, we ran a series of effective activities that aimed to: - support and inspire girls to continue their education in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) - help STEM teachers in vocational training colleges to recruit and retain more girls. The project had the longer term aspiration of raising awareness among a wider target group about the importance of promoting STEM to young women and girls in schools and colleges across Europe. Mind the GAP! achieved some great concrete results through this series of practical activities and tools: - Mind the GAP! Gender Training Programme: Based on original materials from VHTO (NL), this was designed to support teachers to recruit and retain female students on their courses. It also provided teaching tools and inclusive methodologies for increasing teachers' gender-awareness in STEM. - Career Circles: Female STEM students: Based on a peer mentoring and action learning methodology developed by Inova (UK), we created and ran successful Career Circles to support girls studying or recently finishing STEM subjects. This helped them develop the soft skills they needed to further their career plans, assess their goals and build the self-confidence they would need to work in a male-dominated environment. - Career Circles: STEM teachers: Career Circles were also developed for teachers to explore, alongside their peers, some of the issues faced by women in STEM. This helped them to understand how they could better support students, reflect on their own professional development, and share teaching methods and tools. - Mind the GAP! Online Learning Hub: A Learning Hub with materials and resources produced by the project is now available freely to a wider audience of girls, teachers, policy makers and the community. It brings together other Open Educational Resources in a searchable catalogue to help girls and teachers find useful training materials. - Guide for Policy Makers in Science and Technology Education: All five partners contributed to writing a policy makers guide, based on the experience of the project. It highlighted issues of gender diversity in STEM and was disseminated to key policy makers in UK, NL and ES. - Mind the GAP! Media Campaign: A successful media and dissemination campaign ran throughout the project. It ranged from printed posters for classroom walls, through to postings on Facebook and Twitter and a range of “Spread the Word” groups.All Mind the GAP! materials and resources are freely available online and maintained so that we can continue inspiring and supporting girls and teachers and - perhaps one day - see a more gender diverse workforce in STEM professions."

Gender4STEM “Gender aware education and teaching”, is a co-funded Erasmus+ project, led by the Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology (LIST). This project was launched in 2017 and gathered 6 partners, experts in gender, technological and learning issues, beside LIST: Consulio from Croatia, VHTO from the Netherlands, SMART VENICE from Italy, FUNDATIA POFESSIONAL from Romania and Women in Digital and LIST from Luxembourg. To spark greater interest in STEM disciplines among girls, the project Gender4STEM aims to support teachers in stepping up their gender fair teaching practices. “Girls are not talented at science, science is for geeks and thus not for girls…” These are some persistent gender stereotypes in science education. We want to tackle this issue and therefore, we have developed a platform for teachers, to provide them with concrete tools for more gender-fair teaching practices. Our platform is called Gender4STEM Teaching Assistant (https://edu.gender4stem-project.eu/). STEM stands for Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics. These are key drivers for innovation. The problem is that girls are still underrepresented in these disciplines. One of the reasons why STEM disciplines are unappealing to girls might be persistent gender stereotypes. Culture, education, training, labour market practises can be vectors of these stereotypes. Teachers are not always equipped to manage gender diversity in their classrooms. For example, there is little teacher training dealing with these issues. Likewise, teaching materials often lack female role models to stimulate interest of young girls in STEM. Built on the survey of the common gender stereotypes in STEM education in EU (IO1) and the state of the art, as well as the creation of relevant teaching materials to counteract these stereotypes (IO2), the Gender4STEM platform (IO4) provides about 100 teaching materials to support them in stepping up gender-fair teaching practices: a) quiz and tips to raise awareness on gender stereotypes and increase knowledge of women in STEM, b) guidelines to organize gender balance coding sessions or STEM female role model meetings, andc) videos introducing inspiring women in STEM testimonials etc.The Gender4STEM platform is primarily for teachers, but is also relevant for school psychologists and counsellors, as well as career guidance advisors of Secondary Level Education. How can it be used? This is straight forward: Teachers create an account and connect to the Gender4STEM Teaching Assistant platform. Then we recommend using the self-assessment tool (IO3) to find out how gender fair their teaching practices are and propose personalized recommendations of teaching materials (IO3) and experiment them in classrooms.They can also attend the Gender4STEM hands-on blended training (IO5). If they want to know if they have gender-conscious or unconscious biases when teaching, they can participate in two training sessions. They discover the Gender4STEM Teaching Assistant and available teaching materials, with which they can experiment in classrooms, and they can share their difficulties and successes regarding the issue of gender fair in teaching. Thanks to the Gender4STEM platform and training, teachers are fully equipped to get mote girls excited about STEM. At the end of the project, the Gender4STEM community involved about 50 EU teachers, 100 EU students and 60 EU experts. 6 gender fair teaching projects were conducted in European Schools 2019 and 280 people from target groups participated in the multiplier events. More than 2200 people visited the Gender4STEM website (https://www.gender4stem-project.eu/) and about 160 follow the project Facebook page (Gender4stem.erasmus.project). We count 420 users of the Gender4STEM Teaching Assistant platform, among them about 70 have used the self-assessment tool and received recommendations of teaching materials to step up their gender fair teaching. We’re also starting to plan for relevant applications of the self-assessment tool and the recommendations’ system in other areas, for examples: How to promote gender sensitivity among companies, in HR management practices (recruitment or careers’ mobility)? How to promote gender sensitivity in Science and Technology research and academic sector. Of course, the final objective is always to attract more girls and women in STEM!

GirlsTech set itself the goal of supporting the participation of women in the field of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM). Although Europe needs more highly skilled technicians, the participation of women in STEM is very low in most European countries. Europe needs to use all the talents available, especially the talents of woman, but in fact there is a strong underrepresentation of women in the field of STEM. The project therefore focuses on peer learning activities, getting inspired by strategies from other countries and finding out which approaches from the partner countries might be suitable for others.In order to identify the needs and issues relevant for the target group, a project team was selected from three groups: high-, medium and low performing countries. Result of this selection was a collaboration of colleges and universities with a local or regional function and institutions with a national outreach. The selected partners came from eight different European countries who prepared the meetings in their own country. These meetings included a presentation of the different VET systems and their interventions to promote participation of women in STEM. During these meetings particular attention was paid to the good practices from the different participating countries. The projects achievements can be categorized in four main findings. First of all, gender stereotypes in STEM start early. Secondly, educators need to consider female entrance in STEM as a strategic priority. Thirdly, in order to engage girls teaching strategies should be redesigned. Lastly, retaining women in the STEM workforce is important. So, the open exchange of practices and ideas between the different EU countries lead to added value for the target group beyond the national context. On the basis of these findings, some valuable interventions were recommended. Especially from the good practices, some effective and transferable policy measures were identified. For example, gender equality as a policy goal contributes to (compulsory) participation of girls in STEM programmes. Also a focus on Life Long Learning, financially and substantially, can have an impact on girls choosing for STEM as a second chance. Other successful policies mentioned are, among other things, gender aware teaching, clear cooperation between schools and technical companies and female teachers as role models.The impact of this project will differ from country to country. In the Netherlands, the MBO Raad (the Netherlands Association of VET colleges) was able to disseminate the project results nationally among their member colleges. The MBO Raad is also involved in a follow-up of the project, which contributes to the sustainability of GirlTech within the Dutch contect. Beyond the Dutch context, it is likely that this project has an impact on the social inclusion of girls in STEM. What is certainly important, is that the view on gender policies and gender awareness of all the participating partners is improved. Specific information about the project can be found on www.innotecs.eu. Click on GirlsTech in the menu.