On January 10, 2024, we were present at the EU Clusters Talks session addressing the topic of gender equality for SME competitiveness and sustainability. It was a great opportunity to not only introduce our activities, but also engage in a dialogue with cluster policy makers and cluster management teams on what clusters can do to support SMEs on their journey towards gender equality in their workplace. It was not without pride that Lucia Seel, representing our project, mentioned our achievements so far, highlighting the fact that we have so far overachieved by doubling the targeted indicators! For the first year we settled our goals to:

• identify 15 good practices of clusters and policy makers at regional, national and European levels => We gathered 32✓

• make 10 interviews with representatives of companies, clusters and policy makers => We made 20 ✓

• involve 4 countries  => We involved 10 ✓

• Develop a guidebook of 10 training tools for a pan-European gender mainstreaming approach based on the input collected => We developed 18 ✓

Unfortunately, due to technical reasons, it was not possible to launch during this event our PENELOPE-Handbook including all this useful content, but this will be done within the upcoming week. It wil be uploaded on our website https://penelope-project.org/ as well as promoted on our LinkedIn account @PENELOPE-PROJECT.

In casae you could not attend the event, you can watch it online here: https://clustercollaboration.eu/content/eu-clusters-talk-gender-equalit…;