Celebrating Women in Research #IWD2022

Female participation in geotechnical research is one of GEOLAB’s primary goals.

The gender balance across all engineering related disciplines in EU countries is male dominated, with a ratio of 17% of female engineers.

The goal for GEOLAB is to encourage female participation and undertake actions to remove barriers for women to fully engage with engineering research.
We realise that achieving a gender balance that reflects the composition of the whole population is probably not possible given the composition of the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) workforce.
However, we believe that improvements can be made, particularly through attracting groups of researchers that cut across discipline boundaries. We also believe that participation will be encouraged if there are more role models in prominent positions within the network.

To that end, the focus in GEOLAB is on improving the participation of women in key positions of the network accompanied with efforts to attract more early career female researchers to networking events and more trans-disciplinary TA projects involving women.

The female participation targets for GEOLAB are the following:

• Participation in the Management team: 40% (realised)
• International Advisory Board: 40% (realised)
• User Selection Panel: at least 30%
• Access users of GEOLAB research infrastructure: at least 30%
• NG Researcher workshops: at least 30%.

We have identified a range of specific actions to help us achieve the targets and we will monitor these to ensure the successful realisation of female participation within the project.

Find out more about our ongoing initiatives by registering on our Knowledge Platform: project-geolab.eu