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Diversity and inclusiveness

Diversity and inclusiveness

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Diversity within the Advisors

The credibility of the Advisors is built on the balance of qualities and experience amongst the women and men who make up the group. Collectively, they reflect the breadth of the research community across Europe.

Consideration is also given to younger, next-generation leaders.

Diversity within SAPEA

SAPEA focuses on maintaining and improving the diversity of experts who join our working groups from across Europe. Between 2016 and 2024, we drew on the scientific expertise of:

  • 232 working group members
  • 64 peer reviewers
  • 261 expert workshop participants

Members of our working groups are chosen for their scientific excellence and the relevance of their expertise for the topic we are working on. Excellence and expertise are always the main criteria. But we recognise that improving diversity also improves scientific quality, as well as being an important objective in its own right.

Academic discipline

We ensure that each working group has the full range of interdisciplinary expertise necessary to cover the scope of the topic we have been asked to work on. Depending on the topic, this can include experts from natural sciences, engineering and technology, medical, health, agricultural sciences, social sciences, and the humanities.

Gender representation

We have set a target of no more than 60% representation of any one gender across our working groups. We have achieved this target so far: 42% of our working group members were women, drawing from a pool of nominations in which 32% were women.

Women in SAPEA working groups (source: SAPEA)
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Women nominated by academies to SAPEA working groups (source: SAPEA)
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Women appointed at professor level across Europe (source: SHE Figures 2021, European Commission)
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Women among academy fellows (source: Gender Equality in Science 2021, Interacademy Partnership)
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The data we use for the gender identity of our working group members is based on publicly available information. We recognise and respect gender diversity, and we provide working group members with the opportunity to self-identify their gender.

Early- and mid-career researchers

We prioritise including early- and mid-career researchers in our working groups.

We define these categories as follows:

  • early-career researcher: completed their first doctoral degree (PhD or equivalent) no more than 7 years ago
  • mid-career researcher: completed their first doctoral degree (PhD or equivalent) between 8 and 19 years ago
  • late-career researcher: completed their first doctoral degree (PhD or equivalent) more than 19 years ago

From 2018–2022, we had a mechanism in place to allow nominations from Europe’s young academies, including the two transnational academies, the Global Young Academy and the Young Academy of Europe. This was initially organised by the Young Academy of Europe and then, from 2021, by the Young Academies Science Advice Structure (YASAS), which was developed specifically to work with SAPEA.

In May 2022, YASAS became a full partner network in SAPEA. Since then, we have developed a strategy to involve more early- and mid-career researchers in our activities.

Across all working groups, early- and mid-career researchers jointly accounted for 52% in the period from mid-2022 until 2024, rising from 35% in the period from 2016 to mid-2022.

In 2024, we set a target for each working group to include:

  • at least 10% early-career researchers (and always at least one person per group)
  • at least 30% early-career researchers (and always at least one person per group)
  • therefore, at least 40% overall early- and mid-career researchers

Geographical representation

Our experts are drawn almost entirely from Europe: from 2016 to 2024, 97% of working group members worked in Europe. (‘Europe’ here means the 46 member countries of the Council of Europe, plus Israel, which has observer status.)

We received nominations for experts working in 41 different countries in Europe and 12 beyond. This resulted in working group members working in 27 different countries in Europe and 5 beyond.

We monitor the representation of European countries in our working groups. If we notice that a particular country is becoming significantly under- or overrepresented, we take targeted measures to address this, such as providing further guidance for selection committees or approaching individual academies to support them in the nomination process.

We are particularly keen to ensure balanced representation of researchers from so-called ‘Widening’ countries. As defined by the European Commission, Widening countries are countries with a low participation rate in Horizon Europe projects. From 2016 to 2024, 22% of our experts from the EU worked in Widening countries.

The accompanying graphs show two other data points, for context: the share of European researchers working in Widening countries (26%), and the share of Horizon research funding taken up by Widening countries (8% in Horizon 2020, 14.3% in the first two years of Horizon Europe).

Experts from Widening countries in SAPEA working groups (as a share of experts from all EU countries) (source: SAPEA)
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Share of total EU contributions received by Widening countries under Horizon 2020 (source: European Commission)
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EU researchers based in Widening countries (source: Eurostat)
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These figures partly refer to the period when the UK was an EU country. For this reason, the figures for non-Widening countries include the UK.

Unfortunately, determining what counts as a ‘balanced representation’ is challengibg, because directly comparable data does not exist. Furthermore, the scientific expertise required for our topics is not equally distributed across all countries. Despite these limitations, we will continue to closely monitor and broaden geographical representation.

Working group members who are not fellows of academies

We always want the best independent experts. This is why the responsibility for nominating experts lies with our academies and Academy Networks.

But each expert is nominated purely on the basis of his or her expertise, not academy membership. So an expert does not have to be a fellow (member) of an academy in order to join our working groups.

Uncle SAM

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