The Gender Equality Plan (GEP) ensures that equality, diversity and inclusion efforts are firmly anchored across departmental and faculty levels as well as the central administration level, with a continued focus on local efforts, cross-cutting collaboration and dialogue and collective, annual reporting.
The GEP framework offers a way to gather and disseminate and thus optimise and further develop this work.
What is a GEP?
The European Commission defines a GEP as
"a set of commitments and actions that aim to promote gender equality in an organisation through a process of structural change".
How is the GEP-work carried out at SDU?
SDU's Gender Equality Plan provides a framework for SDU's equality work and ensures systematic coordination, direction, and ongoing support and qualification of the initiatives that take place in the organization. SDU's GEP frames, operationalises, and follows up on measures and initiatives in order to ensure equality and equal opportunity at all SDU's organisational levels. It is targeted at SDU's leaders, administrators and GE-organisation, and the GEP follows EU's recommendations for assuring quality in GE endeavors.
SDU's GEP is supplemented by a process plan and thus comprises a formalised, processual framework, and support for and quality assurance of SDU's collected GE efforts. The process plan provides an overview of the GEP annual cycle and activities, as well as involved actors' role, responsibility and tasks.
The objectives and coupling to SDU's vision, mission, and strategy are described in SDU's GE vision statement.
The work ensures a firm anchoring of equality efforts since all heads of departments and heads of divisions at SDU are responsible for working with minimum one action/activity in their department or division on a constant basis. The focus area(s) is identified based on the departments and units' own needs. It often consists of adopting an equality or diversity perspective on other ongoing development tasks. The working environment organisation and union representatives are also relevant actors in the GEP work, and students are involved as collaborators and as target groups.
The GEP framework further ensures that managers have access to close support and assistance from SDU's Gender Equality Team (GET).
The principles behind SDU's GEP work
Dialogue
Sparring and knowledge exchange is crucial to the main area's composition of their individual GE Action Plans. The process consequently includes planned and close contact with GET and the main area's own GE committees and also with the Central Gender Equality Committee
Embedding
Initiatives have to be relevant and make sense locally, to the involved employees, managers and students. After all, they know their own context the best. Consequently, the responsibility for initiating equality efforts is placed as locally as possible
Network
Efforts are supported throughout since all involved actors are offered qualifying assistance, sparring and inspiration from SDU's broader GE organisation, especially across the local GE Committees, counselling from GET and from SDU's International Gender Advisory Board. This fosters mutual inspiration and capacity building