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This joint statement¹ of top management on their engagement for equality, diversity and excellence in research was prepared by the University of Bordeaux, with the collaboration of all RESET partners, as part of Work Package 6 – Act upon governance and upgrade existing excellence policy towards greater inclusiveness. The aim of WP6 is to reflect and co-design new institutional processes of governance in collaboration among the seven RESET institutions for a common enlarged and more inclusive definition of scientific excellence. This WP acts upon three levels: constitutional, operational and decision-making. Its purpose is to develop and adopt inclusive institutional practices and frameworks of recruitment, career progression, work-life balance and excellent research schemes. This statement is an output of both Task 6.5 – Involving top management of each RESET institution to co-design joint policies and statements on gender equality in excellent research schemes, and Task 6.6 – Co-designing and implementing our definition of scientific excellence, and disseminating to ERA. The document presents four main areas of action to leverage sustainable and efficient cultural and institutional change towards more equality and diversity while moving forward in the production of excellent research and innovation results. It illustrates our joint definition of scientific excellence, its concretization at the institutional level and strives for the elaboration of a more inclusive assessment of excellence.

The Redesigning Equality and Scientific Excellence Together (RESET) project involves seven large multidisciplinary universities from Europe. RESET will address the challenge of Gender Equality (GE) in Research Institutions, with the objective to design and implement a user-centered, impact-driven and inclusive vision of scientific excellence and to achieve a structural and cultural change in partner universities. For this purpose, RESET experiments with and develops a “co-design approach”, an innovative approach for addressing gender equality in higher education institutions. Co-design enables the RESET consortium to politically frame and sustainably implement gender and diversity-friendly practices in the work environment. Mainstreaming the co-design approach as an institutional practice for efficient gender equality policy-making and greater stakeholder engagement and support will underpin high-quality and high-impact actions.
This deliverable contains the co-design starter kit (D9.2), part of Work Package 9 – Manage RESET and ensure the quality of its implementation. The purpose of the deliverable is to introduce co-design, including its theoretical background, principles, and practices as well as to offer support for its implementation. The latter is achieved by discussing aspects relating to how to take the context into account in co-design in different contexts as well as by offering a set of tools (example methods) to use within
different co-design practices. This starter kit is based on decades of research on participatory, userand human-centered design with different computing and design disciplines. Initial empirical research has also already been conducted in RESET partner universities on contextual factors shaping co-design of gender equality, from which some empirical insights are presented.
In Part A, this starter kit contains a conceptual framework that discusses the background, principles, and practices of co-design as well as its context-sensitivity. Part B contains altogether 16 tools derived from the literature on co—design, categorized into different practices of co-design: 1) Understanding and sensitizing with the topic; 2) From insights to ideas; 3) Creating design solutions; and 4) Reflecting on and evaluating the designs. For each practice, four example tools are provided, aiming at showing versatility in the method repertoire than can be used. These are complemented with a section on considerations of context. For each method, it is emphasized that tailoring and modification can be done whenever needed. For each method, it is important to acknowledge that familiarizing with the method in more detail is always needed before its use. This document contains only a limited overview of each
method. After the tools, a set of questions with which to reflect on and prepare for the contextual aspects intermingled with co-design of gender equality are presented. This co-design starter kit is a workin-progress and closely interwoven with the ongoing work of the RESET project. It will be enriched as the project evolves during the next three years timespan.

This policy brief highlights main results achieved during the first year of the RESET project and sheds the light on the difficulties encountered, addressing the issues that should be considered by the RPOs and RFOs within further gender mainstreaming and GEP making.

Mainstreaming the gender dimension in research activities and outcomes is a topical challenge related to excellence. The gender dimension in research activities requires an ethically sound process in creating highquality results. Major research funding organisations are increasingly interested in analyses of the gender dimension in research, thereby challenging researchers to review their research plans accordingly. The Gender Impact Assessment (GIA) aims to tackle this challenge. The GIA is not a strict methodology but rather an approach to be further co-designed by local GIA communities of practitioners (CoPs) to ensure its fit into each academic research setting in aiming to improve equality and quality of the knowledge produced. The GIA approach also effectively supports Horizon Europe’s mission-oriented work, in which European research and innovation missions have the objective of delivering solutions to some of the greatest challenges that our world is facing, all of them having gender impact.

The GIA of research content is facilitated with a GIA checklist and a GIA consultation session arranged by the institutional grant writing support staff. Based on experience and collected feedback, the local GIA CoP will finetune the GIA checklist as well as the local institutional consultation practices.
In order to ensure the sustainability of the GIA as an institutional and operational function, a specific GIA protocol will be tailored for the university with the assistance of the GIA CoP. The ultimate version of the GIA protocol must define the institutional structures, processes, resources, and conditions for GIA services, as well as tools that are available for researchers to conduct a proper GIA for mainstreaming the gender dimension in research. The responsibilities of the local GIA CoP will be specified in the GIA protocol, which describes the institutional engagement, and will seek prior approval from middle and top management of the university.