DEBUTING at the EU Clusters Talk on Gender Equality & SMEs

On January 10th, 2024, DEBUTING was strongly represented at the EU Clusters Talk on Gender equality for SMEs’ competitiveness and sustainability, organised by the European Cluster Collaboration Platform (ECCP), on behalf of the European Commission. The highly interesting talk included discussions on the state of gender equality in industry, examples of gender equality work at cluster and policy level, presentations of gender equality related projects such as DEBUTING and Penelope and much more.

The panellists, all involved in the DEBUTING project, succeeded giving the project visibility from different roles and perspectives:

• Anders Olsson, Manager Research and Innovation, Region Värmland – DEBUTING Coordinator
• Lucia Seel, General Manager, Lucia Seel International Consulting – DEBUTING Project Manager
• Luis Goñi, Regional Strategy Director, Innovation Agency of Navarre SODENA – DEBUTING Partner
• Vera Weiß, Project Manager, ecoplus. The Business agency of Lower Austria / Green Building Cluster – DEBUTING Partner

The panellists highlighted the importance of improving Gender Equality in SMEs from different angles. On the policy level improving gender equality is seen to have impacts way beyond the viewpoint of justice: increased gender equality can reduce tensions between groups, reduce political polarisation etc., hugely impacting politics and culture in the country or region. Gender equality is also seen important for smart specialization: for example, in the case of Värmland, Sweden, gender integration is highlighted in their smart specialisation strategy.

Improving gender equality and inclusion have a major role also in combating talent shortage: excluding women from jobs means overlooking approximately half of the potential talent and is an important step in improving talent acquisition. Still, even though in many companies this is acknowledged, things seem to change slowly.

There is clear evidence, that improving gender equality brings SMEs many benefits – not only in the form of social sustainability, but also in increased competitiveness.

On top of shortly introducing DEBUTING project, Lucia Seel also introduced Penelope, an Erasmus+ project related to gender equality and clusters. Complementary to DEBUTING, it is providing knowledge for cluster managers and SMEs on a broader European scale in form of handbooks. The project Women TechEU was presented by Natalia Novińska, stating that the start-up ecosystem is very unbalanced (15% of start-ups co-founded by women, 6% solely founded by women) even though more than half of EU’s population are women. The project aims to address this issue for example by supporting deep tech innovation and promoting female leadership. This is not only about a fairer and more just start-up ecosystem, but also a matter of money, as start-ups founded my women or mixed teams outperform the ones founded by men.

The recording of the event is available here.