Institutional Context. FOM as partner organization of GENERA recently underwent a re-organization process: on 1 January 2017 FOM became part of the NWO Institutes Organisation, together with other NWO divisions. The former FOM has been active in gender policies since the late 1990’s when the FOM/f program 12 Before 2017: Foundation for Fundamental Research on Matter (FOM) started, which provides postdoc positions to bridge the gap to a regular position for female physicists. Gender awareness in general is high (also compared to other GENERA partners). The main aim of gender policies at the moment is to increase the number of female researchers. In management positions women are quite well represented, but only 2 out of 18 (11%) scientific group leaders are women. A recent focus is on gender bias. Besides reflecting on individual bias it is now the main strategy at NWO to strive for (more) women in the research workforce as well as in selection committees. At NWO-I there is no formal gender institutionalization yet, such as having a gender equality plan or a function that takes care of equal opportunity issues, but in the former units a broad range of gender equality measures was implemented (e.g. gender trainings for HR people, mentoring, films to raise awareness). Measures were started bottom-up or top-down - often by women, in senior or leading positions, but more recently also by male directors who feel the need to change the situation. Therefore, the, so-called, ‘spray gun method’ was applied: this means that many different actions are implemented at the same time to make faster progress in changing gender imbalances. This approach was assessed as very effective, in contrast to the often heard argument that not too much should be changed at the same time.
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Sources: Grant Agreement, Grant Agreement