Celebrating 10 years of Gender Summits

What are the Gender Summits?

The Gender Summit is not a conference in a traditional sense. It was created in 2011 by Elizabeth Pollitzer, Director of  Portia Ltd, as an outcome from the EU-funded genSET project, which Portia coordinated, to provide a platform where the theme “Quality Research and Innovation through Equality" could be discussed, based on scientific evidence aimed at consensus on where improvements are needed, established through dialogue between scientists, policy makers, gender scholars and stakeholders in science system.

The mission of the Gender Summit platform began in Europe but has been rapidly adopted in other global regions, covering not only research itself but also innovation and socio-economic development on the basis that gender gaps and biases in scientific evidence become transferred into applications of science knowledge to address societal problems such as urban quality; human adaptation and climate change; food security; transport and mobility.

How to drive success through partnerships

The Elsevier Foundation first became involved in 2011 with a $135,000 grant to Dr Pollitzer, enabling early-career women scientists to successfully navigate the complex research landscape. Since then, to help support and steer this critical process globally, both Elsevier and the Foundation have partnered with Dr. Pollitzer on the Gender Summits in different capacities. This partnership has provided an excellent environment to absorb best practices on gender in research while showcasing Elsevier’s initiatives such as the gender report and helping us work with the research community worldwide.

The Summits, have also increased debate within Elsevier, as have insights generated by benchmarks such as the UK gender pay gap report and Elsevier's 2017-2019 collaboration with EDGE , the leading global assessment methodology and business certification standard for gender equality. These have highlighted the need for us to ensure we apply the same rigour and commitment to diversity within in our own our organization, and we are acting on those insights to make Elsevier an ever more diverse and inclusive place.

It was at a Gender Summit that Dr. Holly Falk-Krzesinski, Elsevier’s VP of Research Intelligence, had her eureka moment. She realized it was time to tackle the conundrum of sex-disaggregated data — and that Scopus, which contains indexed research from 24,600 journals and 5,000 publishers, would offer an ideal testing ground. After Holly introduced this methodology at the 2015 Gender Summit in Berlin, Elsevier was able to improve it with input from key stakeholders. Two years later, we produced Gender in the Global Research Landscape– an analytical report that explored research output and many other critical indicators between men and women in 12 countries across 27 different research areas. Elsevier developed a completely new bibliometric methodology around sex-disaggregation in consultation with many of the experts we met at the Gender Summits, equipping decision-makers with far more granular and important insights into the leaky research pipeline.

The Gender Summits have helped in this context to "define the debate and catalyze action to advance women in science and embed the sex and gender dimension in research", as noted by Elsevier CEO Kumsal Bayazit in the 2021 Gender Summit Europe. In 2020, Elsevier launched its Inclusion and Diversity Advisory Board, tapping in the expertise of several distinguished board members who have driven the Gender Summits since 2011, namely Dr. Elizabeth Pollitzer, Professor Martina Schraudner and Dr. Miyoko Watanabe.

While the participation of women in research is increasing overall, inequality remains across geographies and subject areas in terms of publication outputs, citations, awarded grants and collaborations. That is among the findings of Elsevier's latest gender report, titled The researcher journey through a gender lens, examining research participation, career progression and perceptions across the European Union and 15 countries globally in 26 subject areas.

In a recent Elsevier report entitled, The Power of Data to Advance the SDGs’, Dr. Elizabeth Pollitzer highlighted the “gender blindness” that SDG and sustainability research suffers from.  While some SDGs might not have an obvious need for sex or gender analysis, there is growing recognition that sex and gender must be factored into research to ensure precise results and impactful policy. The International Center for Study and Research(ICSR) has developed an approach to identify and visualize the volume and proportion of research publications that include sex and/or gender in topical research. Using the new SciVal matching tool methodology, ICSR has identified articles that take into account sex and/or gender in the first 16 SDGs.

Dr. Pollitzer had highlighted these important gaps and the risks they pose in the achievement of the UN Sustainable Development Goals Agenda since it was first introduced in 2015. In the sixth Gender Summit, she invited 27 international experts to collaborate on the Gender-Based Innovations for the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) report to show how different gender issues relate to each of the 17 SDGs, and that gender equality and women’s empowerment, which are restricted to SDG5, are not enough to achieve the full impact that gender can have on the success of implementation measures.

In September 2019, the Secretary General of the UN, Antonio Guterres, launched the Decade of Action plan to accelerate delivery of the Sustainable Development Goals, urging all actors to dramatically increase the pace and scale of SDG implementation efforts. The UN 2020 SDG Progress Report has pointed to a number of problems in achieving all SDGs, referring specifically to SDG 5, the report states that: “the promise of a world in which every woman and girl enjoys full gender equality and all legal, social and economic barriers to their empowerment have been removed, remains unfulfilled”. 

During the global Gender Summit 19, Dr. Pollitzer involved experts in gender-SDG areas to identify gender knowledge that can be applied already and the knowledge that is still missing but is necessary to accelerate progress across all SDGs during the Decade of Action, ensuring that the improvement made will benefit women and men equally. The Summit was organized in partnership with Elsevier and hosted in Researcher Academy, a platform offering free e-learning resources designed to support researchers on every step of their research journey.

Written by:

Maha Rhannam
^{Coordinator, The Elsevier FoundationMaha works as a coordinator for the Elsevier Foundation, supporting in that the Foundation's partnerships as well as promoting its activities online, including on social media. Maha graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in International Studies, followed by a Masters in International Development Studies. She served as a sustainability analyst for Vigeo-Eiris, an international CSR rating agency. She also developed an extensive experience in research, having worked as a research assistant on various UNICEF-funded projects relative to education and gender-based violence in sub-Saharan Africa. She grew up in Morocco and is based in The Hague.}