The Institut de Ciències del Mar (ICM-CSIC) has recently begun the development of its Gender Equality Plan (GEP), as part of the project “Leading Towards Sustainable Gender Equality Plans” in research performing organizations (LeTSGEPs), funded by the European Commission’s Horizon2020 Program. This project aims to design and implement actions that will address gender biases in the participating organizations and ultimately lead to systemic institutional change. The project proposes the articulated use of two tools in the development of Equality Plans: the Gender Equality in Academia and Research (GEAR) tool, developed by the European Institute for Gender Equality, and Gender Budgeting (GB). The formulation of ICM’s GEP, implies the compliance with a large regulatory framework stemming from the Spanish Organic Law 3/2007 for effective equality between women and men and its necessary articulation with the Plan for Equality between women and men of the Spanish Research Council (CSIC), the umbrella institution to which ICM belongs. The GEP that is fully consistent with, and responds to, the reality at ICM and present a set of actions aiming at conducting assessment of procedures and practices to identify gender bias, identifying and implementing innovative strategies to correct any bias, and setting targets and monitoring progress via indicators. This challenge requires promoting institutional change that will gradually eliminate barriers to gender equality, both those that are inherent to the research system, and also those that result from biased institutional practices in human resources management, financing, decision- making and research programs management

2nd Meeting of the Iberian Ecological Society (SIBECOL), 3-8 July 2022, Aveiro, Portugal

Peer reviewed