Gendering the Academia and Research. Reflexive Working Groups for Selection Committee Members: Belgium

The objective of organising reflexive working groups with recruitment committee members is twofold. We first wanted to promote, amongst committee members (most of them being full professor) a climate that decreases gender bias in evaluation moments. That was achieved by discussing, during the working groups, the main findings we made in previous working packages of the Garcia project regarding the question of gender bias in UCLouvain organisational culture. We secondly wanted to collect information about the selection criteria that are used in actual recruitment procedures. Discussing, in light of different findings of the Garcia project, evaluation criteria and the perception of what is “scientific excellence” with committee members permit us: 1/to collect information about how “scientific excellence” is conceived in recruitment procedures at UCLouvain and 2/ to raise awareness of gender practices and gender bias in recruitment among key players in recruitment procedures