2022 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. Coming into its seventh year, the Award will be presented in October 2022, sponsored by Google.

The Minerva Informatics Equality Award recognises best practices in Departments/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 2022 Award is devoted to gender equality initiatives and policies to develop the careers of female faculty, including retention and promotion.

The Award seeks to celebrate successful initiatives that have had a measurable impact on the careers of women 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. Submissions will need to demonstrate the impact that has been achieved.

For 2022, examples of impact could include an improved success rate in recruiting, retaining and promoting female staff, increased satisfaction scores from objective surveys of staff experience, achievement of 'beacon' status (i.e. being used as an exemplar within national or regional initiatives).

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 promoting gender equality. To be eligible for the award, applying 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. For organizations with more than one Departments or Institutes, applications coming only from the Department or the Institute with which an Award Committee member is affiliated will not be considered.

The Award committee 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 submission should include:

• Contact information of the Head/Director of the applying Department or Faculty and the responsible person 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 materials);
• Optionally, one or two letters of support. The letters of support may come, for example, from female faculty who have benefited from the scheme, or from the Dean/Head of the organization of the applying Institution confirming impact;
• 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.

Submissions not conforming to the above rules and applications outside of the scope of the current cycle of the Award will be rejected without consideration.

Key Dates:

• Submission Deadline: 30 June 2022
  
• Notification of winner(s): August 2022
• Award Ceremony: October 24-26, 2022

The Award will be presented during the 18th European Computer Science Summit (ECSS), which will be held in Hamburg, Germany, October 24-26, 2022, where a representative of the winning institution(s) will be invited to give a talk on their achievements.

Award Committee*:

• Karima Boudaoud, Université Côte d’Azur, France (Co-Chair)
• Jane Hillston, University of Edinburgh, UK (Co-Chair)
• David Billard, Haute Ecole de Gestion de Genève, Switzerland
• Gregor Engels, University of Paderborn, Germany
• Lucia Happe, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, German
• Francesca Alessandra Lisi, Università degli Studi di Bari "Aldo Moro", Italy
• Emanuela Merelli, University of Camerino, Italy
• Simona Motogna, Babeş-Bolyai University, Romania
• Paula Alexandra Silva, University of Coimbra, Portugal

Further inquiries:

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* Seven out of nine award committee members are also members of the EUGAIN European Network For Gender Balance in Informatics, the Cost Action initiated by the Women in Research and Education group of Informatics Europe in 2019, which currently has more than 100 members, with Informatics Europe as the Grant Holder Manager.