A premiere in the cluster community!🚀 As the first milestone, we focused our work over the past year on developing a practical handbook following these objectives: 👉 To identify good practices among EU clusters and policy makers at regional, national and EU level related to gender equality and gender mainstreaming. 👉 To define a pan-European Gender Mainstreaming Approach through specific tools for SMEs.

We were positively surprised to see the echo in the European cluster community when asked to contribute with their experience and knowledge to our collection of good practices. Thanks to it, we almost doubled the number of good practices identified (from targeted 15 to 28) and the number of interviews (from 10 to 20) carried out with representatives of companies, clusters, and cluster policy makers, with women networks. All these contributions come from Austria, Bulgaria, France, Germany, Italy, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Spain, Sweden, as well as from European networks and associations and global institutions, making our handbook a first truly pan-European effort of its kind. This input was analysed and combined with intensive research led to the design of 18 tools for a gender mainstreaming approach that were structured in eight areas of possible intervention. We are deeply grateful 🙏 to all contributors to this joint work - providers of good practices, interviews and expertise that make this publication a unique support action for clusters and their members, as well as policy makers.WE INVITE YOU NOW TO READ AND MAKE USE OF THE KNOWLEDGE AND TOOLS by downloading the Handbook here 👉 https://penelope-project.org/gender-mainstreaming-for-cluster-teams-han…

Your feedback is extremely valuable to us for the development of the next tools to support clusters and their SME members. If you have a good practice to be shared or a comment to make, just drop us a message at penelope [at] oxalis-scop.org or talk to us via our LinkedIn account @PENELOPE-PROJECT!