Once again this year, March 8 is an opportunity for higher education establishments to mobilize around the visibility of women and their rights. To mark the occasion, many of the 93 universities, grandes écoles and Comue members of CPED are organizing events to question the place of women in science or the arts, to raise awareness of professional equality, to remind people of the importance of gender research, to raise awareness of street harassment, to offer feminist self-defense workshops, to make little-known women visible...
Discover our non-exhaustive list of actions in establishments :
The abundance of these initiatives reflects a growing awareness in higher education establishments, which CPED is delighted to see. The implementation of measures against sexist and sexual violence, which Minister Frédérique Vidal wanted to see effective in all establishments at the start of the 2019 academic year, made clear progress in 2019. Some twenty days of training for higher education staff were provided by the VSS-Training networkset up in 2018 by ANEF, CPED and JuriSup. What's more, in some establishments, the student and community life contribution has freed up new resources for equality awareness initiatives. However, the situation remains very uneven from one institution to another.
On the whole, despite these advances, it has to be said that equality missions do not always have the means to achieve their stated ambitions, nor the necessary institutional support. The CPED calls for a rethink of the inequitable practices that have become entrenched in the way schools operate, but this remains a difficult task, since it requires a strong political will. As an example, in 2019, CPED mobilized on several occasions to ensure that the use of feminine terms was authorized, whether in the statutes of experimental establishments, or on doctoral degrees awarded to women. On February 25, together with several other associations, it launched the Proud of our talents and the words that say it" campaign to upgrade women's titles and functions.
Finally, since 2019, the issue of professional equality has been a major challenge for CPED, as it is for all public-sector employers, with the recent law on the transformation of the civil service making it compulsory to draw up action plans in this area. While establishments are mobilizing in this direction, CPED remains vigilant about the impact of the bills that are being debated today, whether they concern pension reform or the multi-year research programming bill. The specific risks of research careers becoming less attractive to women, and of widening inequalities between women and men, must be taken seriously to ensure that these laws do not run counter to the progress made in recent years.