The Equality Maturity Model: an actionable tool to advance gender balance in leadership and participation roles

TL;DR

The paper introduces the Equality Maturity Model, a practical tool designed to help organizations assess and improve gender balance in leadership and participation roles within Computer Science and Engineering.

Contribution

It presents the Equality Maturity Model, a novel conceptual framework inspired by best practices to measure and enhance gender equality in organizations.

Findings

The EMM provides a structured way to evaluate gender equality efforts.

It identifies key areas for organizational improvement.

The model is based on data and lessons from best practices.

Abstract

The underrepresentation of women in Computer Science and Engineering is a pervasive issue, impacting the enrolment and graduation rates of female students as well as the presence of women in leadership positions in academia and industry. The European Network For Gender Balance in Informatics (EUGAIN) COST action seeks to share data, experiences, best practices, and lessons from failures, and to provide actionable tools that may contribute to the advancement of gender balance in the field. This paper summarises results from the Ph.D./Postdoc to Professor workgroup that were gathered in two booklets of best practices. Specifically, we introduce the Equality Maturity Model (EMM), a conceptual tool aimed at supporting organisations in measuring how they are doing concerning equality and identifying potential areas of improvement and that was inspired by both booklets.