Gender budgeting in academia: A powerful tool for gender equality

Gender Budgeting (GB) represents an important tool to reach gender equality. The aim of this paper is to refer specifically to gender equality in Research performing organisations (RPOs) and to how GB can ensure Gender Equality Plans (GEPs) sustainability. GB can offer a financial perspective of Gender Equality balance and distribution of power within the RPO, unveiling hidden bias and discriminations. The paper outlines the origin of Gender Budgeting starting from 80s to nowadays and reflects on its first implementation in public entities, at governmental and territorial level and its current implementation within RPOs, wondering whether there may be a link between GB public administration and RPOs’ GEP experiences at territorial level due to the same local attention in gender equality. In this sense, the Italian case is analysed, since this country has a long tradition of local gender budgeting implementation that arises from 2002 (reagarding so far about 137 GB local projects) and a more recent but intense engagement in GB at RPOs’ level (about 30 projects). The experience in GB at local institutional level has in fact been very important to develop the GB methodology analysis by the LeTSGEPs European Project of which Unimore is Leading partner. Such methodology has been developed starting from the Account Based Approach and the Capability approach experimented in GB projects at local level in Italy. A powerful strategy to spread GB in Academia can be considered the presence of guidelines at national level, and again Italy can allow to test this hypothesis thanks to the recent production of guidelines by national level institutions and training activities. The GB methodology allows a budget reclassification as a dashboard to adopt an overall view on every RPO’s activity having a financial evidence. By adopting a gender mainstreaming and capability approach, the GB methodology allows to evaluate the intrinsic gender impact of the activities that have been funded and the male/female stakeholders involved at different levels. Together with analysing the Italian case, this paper illustrates the methodological framework and the GB process in the RPOs as described in the LeTSGEPs methodology.