8th EWORA Conference “Global Female Leadership and the Future of Universities”
The European Women Rectors Association (EWORA) is pleased to announce the 8th EWORA Conference which will be co-organized by EWORA, Istanbul Technical University ARI Technopark and Kadir Has University, Istanbul on 2-3 November 2023.
The special focus of the conference will be on “Global Female Leadership and the Future of Universities”. EWORA cordially invites women in leadership positions at universities and research organizations, gender experts and members of higher education networks to join us at the conference.
This event will mark the 15th anniversary the European Women Rectors Conference Series.
The first conference titled “Women Academics Beyond the Glass Ceiling: Women Rectors across Europe” was organised and hosted by Istanbul Technical University on 11th of November 2008. In that conference, we have started to share experiences and developed new ideas to improve the conditions for women academics to remove the barriers for horizontal and vertical segregation. The participants of the first conference also agreed upon furthering this exchange and establishing a network by holding similar conferences every two years regularly in the future which eventually paved the way for the establishment of EWORA in 2015.
Since 2008, leaders from the academia and the private sector both male and female, prominent political figures, policy makers and experts from all over the world, the private sector and academia, have met together in various European cities. We have witnessed that there is an advancement of gender equality at all levels of higher education but we have also mentioned that this advancement is too slow especially at senior levels. Accordingly, we have discussed the strategies and policies that could be employed to improve the inclusion of women at top-management levels of academia.
The Istanbul event this year will identify the experiences from which wider lessons can be learnt, using concrete country cases. She Figures 2021 still reports that women remain underrepresented in senior leadership positions of higher education and research. We will reflect on the achievements, challenges and opportunities that women rectors and senior leaders experience in their positions and discuss the methodologies that can be used to improve their effectiveness and performances as leaders. The conference further aims to analyse and compare the different international practices and policies in the enhancement of the future of the universities.
We will together ask and discuss “What will universities of the future look like?” and highlight the “importance of women in leadership roles” in shaping this future. We will identify the developments on gender equality in the last 15 years and we will further develop strategies for challenging gender equality to remove barriers and speed up the improvements for increasing women representation at top level of University administration.
This year’s conference will also include the MEDNIGHT GALA.
MEDNIGHT, the Mediterranean Researchers’ Night, includes among its activities the selection of the Mediterranean Science Team and the grand Gala at which the 11 chosen scientists of the Team will be presented to the public, and the media. With the Mediterranean Science Team, MEDNIGHT seeks unity through science for 23 countries bordering the same sea. Mednight has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 101061190
We cordially invite you to attend the 8th European Women Rectors Conference and join to celebration of 15th anniversary of European Women Rectors gatherings.
We look forward to meeting you all in Istanbul in order to enhance the bridge between Eastern and Western Academia and to open up the ways for transferring knowledge and analyzing the similar and different “gender equality” challenges in different regions of the World.