A reflexivity exercise on the Gender equality in S&T issue in FP7 funded programs: new challenges for Horizon 2020 projects

In the 2009 Report of the MASIS Expert Group, 'Challenging Futures of Science in Society - Emerging Trends and Cutting-Edge Issues', the diagnosis was one of a patchwork of ongoing partial and contested transformations. Identified trends included the re-contextualization of institutions and practices of science in society, the growing interest in accompanying institutional changes, and science new reflexivity about its own role and impacts. Our focus is reflexivity about the gender equality in S&T issue as addressed in the EU framework Programs and its impact on a national context, as the Italian one. We have been involving in our study different sister projects addressing gender inequalities in S&T, being funded under the 7th Framework Program Call “Science in Society” (GENOVATE, TRIGGER, GARCIA…). Researchers working within one of the Gender in S&T programs funded under the Horizon 2020 call “Science with and for Society (PLOTINA) addressed too, in a thoughtful exchange oriented to mutual learning. The results of this reflexive exercise reveals ambivalences, strains, tensions, organizational opportunism, but also the opening of opportunities and levers for institutional change, addressing deep epistemological and societal roots of European political and scientific arenas. Gendering processes appear to be an overarching and ever changing while re-contextualizing mechanism of cultural, structural and institutional dynamics, to be sociologically understood and politically addressed. Gender equality is not conceivable as a fixed and predefined target, but as a changing and permanent cultural, structural and institutional issue.