International Women’s Day - EBRAINS webinar discusses strategies to empower change in academia

The webinar, open to everyone in the EBRAINS 2.0 consortium, featured presentations and discussions led by Valentina Borghesani, of the Women in Neuroscience Repository (WiNRepo https://www.winrepo.org/) and Karin Grasenick, task leader at EBRAINS 2.0 and founder of CONVELOP.

During the webinar, participants had the opportunity to gain insights into empowering women in neuroscience and addressing challenging working conditions in academia in general. “The gender bias issue in neuroscience is important and something we need to fight against”, said Borghesani during her presentation. The WiNRepo platform helps to identify and recommend female neuroscientists for conferences, symposia and other collaborations, to address the underrepresentation of women in those scientific events.

Karin Grasenick, in her talk, spoke about difficult working conditions in academia which can be particularly challenging for women in science, given the prevailing biases. Participants started a discussion on how to create a collaborative working culture that is inclusive, by for example demonstrating respect, speaking up for each other and valuing teamwork more than individual achievements.

EBRAINS 2.0 will build on the work done in the HBP that will be further developed especially for large science consortia, such as the equality, diversity and inclusion measure toolkit that supports projects in integrating EDI principles into their daily work. (www.edi-toolkit.org)