Prof. Brenda Murphy from the Department of Gender & Sexualities within the Faculty for Social Wellbeing has recently been appointed as a member of the Minerva Informatics Equality Award Committee.
On a related note, Prof. Murphy is also currently participating in COST Action CA19122 - European Network for Gender Balance in Informatics (EUGAIN), the main aim of which is to improve gender balance in Informatics through the creation and strengthening of a multi-cultural European network of academics working on the forefront of the efforts in their respective communities. This Action will provide the academic community, policymakers, industry and other stakeholders with recommendations and guidelines to address a number of key challenges, such as how to increase female participation in Informatics as their profession, and how to encourage more female postdoctoral researchers to remain in the academic career and apply for professorships in the same area of expertise.
The Minerva Informatics Equality Award is devoted to gender equality initiatives encouraging female students to enrol in Computer Science/Informatics programmes and retaining them.
The 2021 Edition, which is the sixth one, is themed ‘Recruiting and Supporting Female Students’, and is being sponsored by Google.
The Informatics Europe Minerva Informatics Equality Award recognises best practices in Departments or Faculties of European Universities or Research Institutes and Labs that have been demonstrated to have a positive impact for women. On a three-year cycle the award will focus each year on a different stage of the career pipeline:
- Developing the careers of female faculty, including retention and promotion;
- Supporting the transition for PhD and postdoctoral researchers into faculty positions;
- Encouraging female students to enrol in Computer Science/Informatics programmes and retaining them.
For 2021, examples of impact could include fostering gender balance in all aspects of students’ education, better admission, recruitment and graduation rates for female students, better gender ratio of students receiving stipends, scholarships and other financial support, improved curriculum, designed based on gender analysis, as recorded in objective surveys of staff and student experience, etc.
The Award carries a prize of EUR 5,000.
The Award will be given to a Department or Faculty to be used for further work on encouraging the recruitment and support of female students. To be eligible, institutions must be located in one of the member or candidate member countries of the , or Israel. Institutions associated with members of the Award committee are not eligible.
The Award committee, with participation of members from the , will review and evaluate each proposal. It reserves the right to split the prize between different applications. Moreover, noteworthy runners up may also be included as in future Informatics Europe publications.
Deadline for nominations is 1 June 2021.
Winners will be notified on 1 August 2021.
Further enquiries are to be made via email.
