Overall objective: Reducing the gender gap in confidence to do politics
G-EPIC, a multinational consortium of universities and civil society organisations from 6 countries (Belgium, Czechia, Denmark, Germany, Spain and United Kingdom), has been brought together with the aim of fostering social innovation and testing interventions to reduce gender inequality in politics by making citizenship education inclusive. With this purpose, G-EPIC will roll out an interdisciplinary approach that combines insights from political science, sociology, gender studies, youth studies, and educational sciences.
The 7 partners will begin by establishing the state of play through classroom observations and reanalysis of existing quantitative data to understand how inequalities in attitudes and dispositions towards political engagement are learnt. G-EPIC will then create experiments in schools and pilot design-based interventions developed in a co-creation process with civil-society, teachers and students.
G-EPIC will also carry out a holistic evaluation of the national context and the local and European policy framework to design strategies, regulations and policies that are conducive to a more equitable gender political involvement, particularly of girls with a disadvantaged background. The toolbox generated this way during the project will become an international reference of best practice to foster gender equity in politics from the classroom onwards boosting more girls to get involved in politics when they reach adulthood.
Specific objectives
To reach this overall objective, we define a set of specific objectives (SO):
- SO1: To provide an evidence base that identifies, over the long term, the range and the intersection of different socio- economic characteristics that structure political inequalities when they originate early in people’s lifetime, and to examine what the consequences are for their political engagement.
- SO2: To investigate how political inequality is learnt through classroom dynamics.
- SO3: To assess the conditions in which school interventions are successful in reducing the gender gap in political attitudes, particularly political self-efficacy among pupils.
- SO4: To co-create, pilot and evaluate a school-based gender empowerment intervention and to enhance its success through close contact with schools, educational practitioners and adolescents.
- SO5: To develop research-informed strategies, regulations and policies for cooperation with stakeholders and end- users at the national and European level that guarantee an equitable and inclusive democratic exercise.
- SO6: To increase the impact of the project by communicating, disseminating and exploiting its results, tailored to the needs of different audiences and target-groups in the national and European contexts.