Research has long pointed to various barriers faced by women in research, such as prejudices, barriers associated with parenthood and higher levels of job insecurity. These factors hinder their career progression and increase their likelihood of leaving an academic career. For the Czech research ecosystem, losing these researchers means losing highly educated people, their expertise, creativity, perspectives and experience. A substantial proportion of the educated population misses out on the opportunity to contribute to the creation of knowledge and shaping of the world through research and innovation. This can have negative consequences, not only in terms of a missed opportunity to improve quality of life, but also in terms of failing to utilise all the resources of the knowledge economy.
The Czech Republic has long been one of the EU countries with the lowest proportion of women in research, and their share has been stagnating for a long time (for more information on the gender balance in research at a national level and in an international context, see the report The Position of Women in Czech Science, published by the Centre for Gender & Science).For the aforementioned reasons, TA CR has taken the gender composition of research teams into account when evaluating research proposals in selected calls for proposal since 2017. At the same time, we have also been monitoring the proportion of women and men among applicants and recipients in individual calls for proposals and funding programmes. The focus has been on both research team members and principal investigators. An overview of this data is available HERE.