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Broadly speaking, although the ERC application ratios reflect the proportion of women at the different stages of
research careers in Europe, the ERC Scientific Council is concerned about the gender imbalance in many fields
of research. In this sense, in 2010, the ERC Scientific Council adopted a
(19)
that aimed to
consider and confront structural gender differences, so that the ERC can fulfill its mission to support excellent
frontier researchers across Europe, irrespective of nationality, gender or age. The plan, based on the view that
women and men are equally able to perform excellent frontier research, was prepared by the ERC Gender Bal-
ance Working group, adopted by the Scientific Council in December 2010 and published in February 2011. The
gender equality plan exhibits three central goals: to raise awareness among potential women scientists in order
to improve the number of female applicants submitting ERC proposals in all research fields, to ensure fairness
and equal treatment in the ERC Grant competitions, and to improve the gender balance within the ERC’s peer
review system. In this context, the ERC evaluation criteria were adjusted in the
in
order to emphasize that career breaks and/or unconventional research career paths of Principal Investigators
(PIs) shall be taken into account, and to offer female PIs an increased extension to the Starting Grant eligibility
window of 18 months per child born before or after the awarding of their PhD.
It should be noted that the National Documentation Centre supports and promotes the European policy on
Gender Equality through its participation in the European projects
GENDERA:
and
. To this end,
EKT has developed a Database of good practices for equal opportunities of genders in research (practices re-
lated to recruitment, selection and promotion); Guidelines for integration of gender issues in research organiza-
tions; Study on policies for women’s career development in research; National task forces on gender issues in
research; and completed a mapping survey about Greek women researchers in 2007.
Attractiveness of the Greek R&I
Landscape Based on the Results of ERC Calls
One of the main objectives of the ERC is to enhance the ability of Europe to retain and repatriate the best re-
searchers in Europe as well as to attract talents from abroad. To meet this objective the Scientific Council has
delineated a strategy based on the reduction of mobility barriers as well as on the empowerment of researchers
by offering attractive funding conditions, the possibility of grant portability and by supporting the early inde-
pendence of emerging top talents. In addition to this, both ERC funding schemes (Starting & Advanced Grants)
encourage researchers that reside outside the ERA to move to an EU or Associated Country by offering financial
incentives and flexible project implementation conditions. As such, non-ERA resident researchers can request
additional funding to cover “start-up” costs such as the purchase of major equipment necessary in their new
research environment (500.000
€
for Starting Grant and 1 Mio
€
for Advanced Grant) and both funding schemes
request researchers to spend at least 50% of their working time in an ERA country and 50% (Starting Grants) /
30% (Advanced Grants) of their working time on the project.
•
Chart 23
:
Number (& %) of female
ERC grantees in Greece per funding scheme
•
Chart 24
:
Number (& %) of female
ERC grantees in Greece per domain
0
5
10
15
20
ERC Starting
Grantees
ERC Advanced
Grantees
ERC Grantees
Female
Male
0
0
4
(44%)
3
(20%)
5
(56%)
12
(80%)
0
3
6
9
12
15
Life Sciences
domain
Physical Sciences
& Engineering domain
Social Sciences
& Humanity domain
0
7
10
7
(50%)
7
(29%)
17
(71%)
53
MAPPING OF EXCELLENCE in the greek research and innovation landscape