Trust-IT Gender Equality Plan: enabling gender equality through equal opportunities

As part of its gender equality strategy for 2020-2025, the European Commission is committed to promoting gender equality, a fundamental value of the European Union and one of the UN’s sustainable development goals (SDGs), in research and innovation. In fact, all provisions for gender equality in research and innovation under Horizon Europe will contribute directly to the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 5 on Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment.

Reflecting the Horizon Europe legal basis, which strengthens gender equality as a cross-cutting priority, the European Commission is now requiring all public bodies, higher education institutions and research organisations from EU Member States and associated countries wishing to participate in Horizon Europe to have a Gender Equality Plan (GEP).

According to the recently published guideline “Horizon Europe Guidance on Gender Equality Plans”, a Gender Equality plan is:

“A set of commitments and actions that aim to promote gender equality in an organisation through institutional and cultural change”.

In particular, the European Commission considers a Gender Equality Plan as a set of actions aiming at: 

• Conducting impact assessment/audits of procedures and practices to identify gender bias.
• Identifying and implementing innovative strategies to correct any bias.
• Setting targets and monitoring progress via indicators.

Gender Equality increases the quality and relevance to society of the knowledge, technologies and innovations produced, improving European research in several ways by: 

• Creating working environments where all talents can thrive.
• Maximising the potential and talents of all staff and students.
• Helping to attract and retain talent by ensuring that all staff can be confident that their abilities will be valued and recognised fairly and appropriately.

Trust-IT Services and gender equality

This is why, as a key partner for many Horizon Europe research projects, Trust-IT Srl (Trust-IT, for short) has recently published the January 2022 version of its Gender Equality Plan (GEP) published in October 2021, which states the goals and status of gender equality progress within the organisation covering the next three years (2021-2024).

The GEP also applies to Trust-IT’s subsidiary COMMpla Srl (COMMpla, for short), which is co-located with Trust-IT, is run by the same management, and has an internal agreement with Trust-IT to mutually second personnel whenever needed by projects.

Through the continuous monitoring of gender equality indicators, our GEP addresses four priority areas of intervention to ensure a culture that enables equal opportunities for women and men within our organisations:

1. Equal access to employment, recruitment, and selection.
2. Performance evaluation and career progression.
3. Work-life balance.
4. Internal and external information and communication.

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Article by

Luigi Colucci
Marketing Analyst