Inclusivision proposals

Announce Your Pronouns!

This initiative aims to normalize pronoun sharing, similar to how we share job titles, to ensure everyone is addressed correctly. We address one another every day on the basis of pronouns. But how do you know what term to use for someone you have just met or only know via email? You cannot deduce this from someone's appearance or name alone. It can often be daunting for people to share their pronouns - nobody wants to be the odd one out. By including your pronouns in your email signature you can help to normalize asking for people's pronouns and sharing your own instead of assuming. Join us in fostering an inclusive environment by adding your pronouns to your email signature!

Onboarding for Internationals

A continued need for better onboarding of international students has been identified. This project, now overseen by the internationalization department, aims to enhance integration efforts for students from non-NL backgrounds. Further measures will be developed to address this issue.

Inclusive Campus Map

Originally initiated to ensure that staff and students are aware of facilities for neurodiversity, spiritual reflection, and accessibility, this project aims to incorporate various aspects of accessibility and inclusiveness into a digital campus map. This effort is part of UG’s broader accessibility project, detailed here: UG Accessibility Project.

Gender Neutral Bathrooms

Since 2020, a pilot program for gender-neutral bathrooms has been underway in the Aletta Jacobs exam hall, following a proposal approved in 2019-2020. With the successful involvement of facilities, the implementation of gender-neutral bathrooms will now extend to the Duisenberg building in the upcoming year.

Sanitary Products in Restrooms

A pilot program to provide sanitary products in restrooms has been positively received by female staff and students over the past year. However, consistent stocking remains an issue. Ongoing collaboration with facilities will fine-tune this process to ensure effective and reliable availability of these products.

Women in E&B

This initiative aims to provide a safe and open space for female academics in the business disciplines to learn together and support one another across generations and leadership roles. By facilitating an inclusive environment for connection and experience sharing, this program, currently in discussion with the HR department, seeks to foster personal and professional growth.

Ramadan Awareness

Building on the success of FEB’s 2024 Ramadan breaking the fast event, there is a recognized need to raise awareness about Ramadan and other religious holidays. Through the Inclusivision panel, discussions highlighted the importance of general awareness about religious practices in general and especially religious practices that could impact one’s energy levels. Consequently, a policy will be developed to increase the awareness and understanding of fasting practices.

Successful Scholars, Peaceful Parents 

This ongoing project focuses on understanding and addressing the difficulties that scholars encounter when they have to decide between starting a family and advancing their research careers. The objective of this initiative is to establish an academic work environment that is supportive of parents, attracting and nurturing highly skilled scholars while enabling them to raise their young children in a stress-free setting. The project is currently running and an advisory report is expected at the end of the 2023/2024 academic year.

Gender Economics Symposium

This project aims to broaden the horizon of the actual research on gender in economics. This symposium hopes to raise awareness and encourage discussions on gender-related issues in economics across various departments by building a community of researchers and informing the academic community at FEB. The program, including short presentations by researchers and a panel discussion, will be integrated into the future Diversity Week program. 

Increased support for the Muslim community in the FEB

To better support the objective of establishing a more inclusive and accepting environment, a special Ramadan activity  is currently  being developed. The purpose of this program is to raise awareness about Ramadan and Islam among non-Muslims, acquaint them with the topic, and promote a sense of representation, acceptance, awareness, and most importantly unity between Muslims and non-Muslims during the month of Ramadan.

EOR Female Outreach Program

The project aims to make the Econometrics and Operations Research program at the FEB more diverse and inclusive. Currently, a program is being developed with the goal of teaming up with current female EOR students to organize down-to-earth outreach events, including talks at local high schools, gatherings on campus, and special open-day experiences. The ultimate goal is to inspire and support young women who may not have considered EOR studies at FEB. 

Diversity Week

The week of 8-12 May 2023 has been selected for several events taking place. It will be the first time that FEB organizes a Diversity week with relevant events for staff and students. Events will include guest lectures, workshops, and panel discussions

Deep Democracy for students

A pilot Deep Democracy training series of 3 sessions will be offered to students of a selected programme, this spring. Deep democracy is a relevant tool to further explore minoritized voices and the undercurrent in group work

First Generation Academics - Awareness

The initiative is to set up a pilot support group for students who are “first gen”; the first in their families to join academia. The programme is intended to support first generation students and has been on hold since Fall 2022, and is to be integrated with efforts of the study advisors and wellbeing officer, as well as efforts of FEB student assessor. Further development is expected in Spring 2023. Students and staff interested in being part of the peer & mentor programme, can sign up.

FEB Inhouse Research Symposium on Diversity

A concept programme has been developed together with FEBRI and involved researchers. A call for proposals will be communicated in spring 2023. The half-day programme, incl. short presentations of FEB researchers and a panel discussion will be integrated into the programme of Diversity Week (8-12 May 2023)

Gender & Sexuality Support Group

This concerns a FEB-wide invitation to a support group on gender & sexuality. The Gender & Sexuality Alliance (GSA) is in the process of setting up a calendar of activities for 2023 and 2024, and currently consist of 5 active organizing members

A Women network at FEB, piloted at EEF

In line with FEB’s action plan for D&I, some faculty members have started informal circles for peer support to exchange ideas and best practices about the female career trajectory. The EEF department is currently piloting peer coaching, facilitated by an external expert on academic leadership.

Attention for Muslim Students

A total of 8 students gathered to exchange ideas with the initiator. The outcome is that they will first continue informal meetings, and further identify what they would like to organize around holidays.

Rainbow Crossing

EBF board of 2019-2020 requested for a rainbow crossing on campus to raise awareness for the LGBTQ+ community at the University of Groningen. Their commitment, seeking collaboration with the FEB Faculty Board and UG Facility Services, has resulted in the installment of the rainbow crossing in the summer of 2021. The opening took place on Diversity Day, 5 October 2021, where the dean of FEB Peter Verhoef and chairman of the EBF Lars Wartena shared their perspective of how we should contribute to the social safety of, acceptance of and learning from the LGBTQ+community.

Gender-neutral restroom

A few requests have been made by several students across FEB to initiate a gender-neutral restroom in or close to the Duisenberg building. In collaboration with facility services, who were involved in the renovations of the Aletta Jacobs exam hall, a gender-neutral restroom was installed in 2020.

Sensory room

To support students and staff that benefit from limited stimuli, Ivan Palko, at that time MSc Marketing student and currently a junior lecturer in Marketing, suggested FEB Duisenberg building to initiate a sensory room. Due to housing limitations, and already ongoing updates to the Reflection Room, Facility Services is exploring options to add needed equipment to the new reflection room (link only accessible for FEB staff and students) which is located in Kapteynborg (5419.122). Equipment and solutions include: pillows with different fabrics, blinds/shutters to cancel out sunlight, a room divider, fidget toys and sensory objects, and an adjustable light with different colours.

Event for International Women’s Day

In the initiatives of 2021, both Inclusivision panel members Kyra van Hinsberg and Anna Minasiyan, phd students, and staff members have called for professional and personal development in the realm of gender diversity (with specific attention for female empowerment and female leadership). These suggestions are quite closely connected to the recommendations of the D&I Work Group of FEB (2020), and will therefore contribute to FEB’s D&I policy in the upcoming years.

One concrete outcome, however, is to set up events in preparation for International Women’s Day (8 March), to provide support but also provide a learning space for everyone regarding how to contribute to, for instance, the university’s Gender Equality Plan action items. Plans for International Women’s Day 2022 are currently underway.

More info on parenthood and parental leave through HR

Connected to the initiative on the lactation room, both male and female colleagues have requested to make the information on parenthood, parental leave, and other employer conditions more transparent to the FEB community. The FEB HR advisors, together with the communication department, are currently updating the HR webpages on our intranet and making the information better accessible, such as adding information to new colleagues joining FEB. In doing so, we can prevent this information only reaching those colleagues who have been around long enough to learn about the terms and conditions through informal contacts.

Recommendations tenure track policy

Connected to the Work Group at FEB for Diversity, Inclusion, and Social Safety, various colleagues have anonymously delivered input to update the Tenure Track Policy (link only accessible for FEB staff). Suggestions included using more gender neutral vocabulary in describing life events and other conditions, providing more room to recognize and appreciate social contributions to the FEB, and including adoption as an addition to the information on life events, referring to parenthood.

Examples of gender neutral vocabulary is referring to “ they”, thereby always addressing the reader as any (group of) FEB staff. Other suboptimal examples are the use of she/he/they.

First generation students

Staff and students who experienced the implications of being a so-called ‘ First-Gen’ in academia, have called upon FEB to provide support and peer-to-peer learning options for incoming students belonging to this group. First generation students can experience barriers in getting accustomed to the university setting, but can also find it challenging to translate their experiences to their family and/or friends who are not necessarily part of the academic community. Because this can sometimes have a demotivation effect, the Inclusivision project will look further into support options.

Active Bystander Training for students associations

In a first call for Inclusivision, FEB collaborated with the EBF boards of 2019-2020 and 2020-2021 to set-up active bystander workshops for the board members. The workshop’s goal is to provide a toolkit for bystander intervention, to help participants overcome the so-called bystander effect when inappropriate jokes or behaviour occur. The aim of bystander intervention is to provide a more socially safe environment for all, and EBF sees their role in contributing to this iun the setting of student associations. After a first successful round, the EBF board decided to follow-up with a broadened initiative in the Inclusivision call of 2020. Via this initiative, all boards of FEB study associations (FSG, TeMa, VESTING, MARUG and GFE), have been trained as well as all FEB committee chairs. A next step is to provide an open call to all students to participate in Active Bystander workshops, for instance during next Diversity Month.

Women in FEB Academia

With an (online) booklet, we celebrate the achievements and experiences of 11 FEB female academics. In it, you can read their career stories, tips for your career and their advice to organizations that want to foster a diverse and inclusive working environment.

This initiative came from several female researchers from different FEB departments and from different positions, in collaboration with policy officers internationalization, diversity, and inclusion. With experts from the Learning Community Women in Business, and the help of two student assistants; Nela Noll & Noa Vickers, 11 interviews were conducted to provide more insight into the experiences when it comes to women in FEB academia.

Raising the rainbow flag

Both FEB staff and students have requested raising the rainbow flag on specific dates to raise awareness and illustrate support for the LGBTQ+ community. Two project members of the International Classroom project, of which one sub-project facilitated research into the LGBTQ+ experiences within the FEB student community, have provided dates on which the rainbow flag could be raised. In collaboration with FEB facility services, and the University Council, a policy was developed throughout the University of Groningen resulting in the flag to be raised on days such as Purple Friday, National Coming Out Day, and the working days in or just before Pride Week.

Renovations to the lactation room

Colleagues at FEB who are also a parent, specifically moms utilising the lactation room (link only accessible for FEB staff) at Duisenberg building (5411.252), have requested to make the room more up to date. In collaboration with the previous arbo manager, several changes have been made, including additional electrical sockets, and a coffee table and a fridge have been added to the room.