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European Women Rectors Association (EWORA) is a full-fledged International Non-Profit association established in Brussels under Belgian Law in December 2015 to promote the role of women in leadership positions in the academic sector and to advocate gender equality in higher education and research at European and international scales. EWORA is the continuation of European Women Rectors Platform (EWRP), which has been active since 2008 in organizing biennial European Women Rectors Conferences.
Istanbul Technical University took part in a FP6 project titled “UNICAFE” that was funded by EC between the years 2006-2008. The dissemination conference of UNICAFE was organized by the ITU team in 2008. As many findings of UNICAFE project pointed the importance of leadership for achieving gender equality in HE institutions the first conference for European women rectors was organized as a pre-conference meeting of the UNICAFE dissemination conference in 2008 in Istanbul. Since then biennial conferences organized and hosted by Istanbul Technical University and European Women Rectors Platform (EWRP) was formed in 2010. These Biennial Conferences that are entitled “Beyond the Glass Ceiling: Women Rectors Across Europe” provided the opportunity for women rectors and vice rectors to share their experiences as academic leaders. They also have brought together an interdisciplinary group of women academic leaders who share a commitment to foster new approaches in order to increase the number of women academic leaders around the world. The participants of these conferences also focused on new ideas to improve the conditions for women academics to remove the barriers for horizontal and vertical segregation.