2021 Minerva Informatics Equality Award

We proudly announce the Minerva Informatics Equality Award devoted to initiatives seeking to encourage and support the careers of women in Informatics research and education. The sixth of these annual awards will be presented in October 2021 and is sponsored by Google.

The Minerva Informatics Equality Award recognises best practices in Departments or Faculties of European Universities or Research Institutes and Labs that have been demonstrated to have a positive impact for women. On a three-year cycle the award will focus each year on a different stage of the career pipeline:

• Developing the careers of female faculty, including retention and promotion;
• Supporting the transition of female PhD and postdoctoral researchers into faculty positions;
• Encouraging female students to enrol in Computer Science/Informatics programmes and retaining them.

The 2021 Award is devoted to gender equality initiatives encouraging female students to enrol in Computer Science/Informatics programmes and retaining them. 

The Award seeks to celebrate successful initiatives that have had a measurable impact on the recruitment and support of female students within the institution. Such initiatives can serve as exemplars of best practices within the community, with the potential to be widely adopted by other Institutions.

For 2021 examples of impact could include fostering gender balance in all aspects of students’ education, better admission, recruitment and graduation rates for female students, better gender ratio of students receiving stipends, scholarships and other financial support, improved curriculum, designed based on gender analysis, as recorded in objective surveys of staff and student experience, etc.

The Award carries a prize of EUR 5,000.

The Award will be given to a Department or Faculty to be used for further work on encouraging the recruitment and support of female students. To be eligible, institutions must be located in one of the member or candidate member countries of the Council of Europe, or Israel. Institutions associated with members of the Award Committee are not eligible.

The Award committee, with participation of members from the EUGAIN COST Action, will review and evaluate each proposal. It reserves the right to split the prize between different applications. Moreover, noteworthy runners up may also be included as exemplars of best practice in future Informatics Europe publications.

 The proposal should include:

• Contact information of the Head/Director of the applying Department or Faculty and the responsible for the application (who can be the same); 
• A brief summary or abstract (100 words or less) which can be made public;
• Description of the initiative (max 2 pages);
• Evidence of its impact (max 2 pages);
• An optional reference list (which may include URLs of supporting material);
• Optionally, one or two letters of support. The letters of support may come, for example, from female students who have benefited from the scheme;
• An indication of whether the submission can be considered as a runner up (if it does not win the award) and be included as an exemplar of best practice in future Informatics Europe publications.

 Deadlines:

• Full submissions: 15 June 2021
• Notification of winner(s): 1 August 2021

The Award Ceremony, jointly organized by EUGAIN and Informatics Europe, will be held at the 17th European Computer Science Summit, 25-27 October 2021 in Madrid (if the COVID-19 situation allows), where a representative of the winning institution(s) will be invited to give a talk on their achievements. 

Award Committee:

• Susan Eisenbach, Imperial College London, UK (Chair)
• Hagit Attiya, Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, Israel
• Barbora Buhnova, Masaryk University, Czech Republic
• Sarah Jane Delany, TU Dublin, Ireland
• Steve Kremer, Inria, France
• Monica Landoni, Università della Svizzera italiana, Switzerland
• Brenda Murphy, University of Malta, Malta
• Ute Schmid, University of Bamberg, Germany

Further inquiries:

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