IDUN and BBI are funded under the Research Council of Norway (NFR) BALANSE program. The program wants to bring structural and cultural change in the research system through new knowledge, learning and innovative measures. BALANSE is in its second period (2017-2022). There are 37 active BALANSE projects.

IDUN and BBI are projects and as all projects are efforts taken by individuals to achieve a goal. IDUN and BBI have in common that they aim to increase gender balance in research positions in academia.

Each project starts from a goal, possibly quantifiable. In IDUN we declared that we wanted to increase the number of female in all scientific positions from PhD to professor by 20%. IDUN targets a whole faculty with 581 employees in scientific positions (of which 22% female), 125 professors (13,8% female).

BBI targets a department with 35 employees in scientific positions (of which 11% female), 9 professors (22% female), and 16 PhD (6% female).

IDUN receives 10 MNOK of funding and BBI 1.3 MNOK. However small projects function as big ones and challenges and methods in projects are the same.

Each project needs resources, not only money, but connections to network of professionals and in our case to students. Each project needs to build on established knowledge to produce new knowledge and new actions.

The project that is of inspiration for both IDUN and BBI arethe ADA project (for which you have seen a short video few minutes ago) and several projects in Europe and Internationally.

I want to remind you that this is a pre-event of the ACM WomEnCourage conference and tomorrow we will give a tutorial for the main conference, about ADA, IDUN, BBI starting from 9 am.

We aim at revitalizing the ACM Chapter and organize the ACM womEnCourage in Norway in 2023 – please contact me during or after this event if you are interested in cooperating.