Quantifying for Qualifying: A Framework for Assessing Gender Equality in Higher Education Institutions

This paper presents a very useful instrument to measure GE in HE institutions that is most needed in the field. Furthermore, the construction and content of the tool is based in sound literature review and bibliometric analysis. As a result I have a very positive opinion of the merit and quality of the paper, particularly the first part.

Many thanks!

My only apprehension concerns the validation of the instrument as the institutions selected do not only differ in having / not having GEPs but rather in many other cultural and social aspects that may have contributed to the obtained results.

We believe the fact that the 2 institutions being different is not a problem. Our aim was to make a test to the index using real cases. The 2 institutions were chosen due to the ease of access to data. The authors are based in these institutions so it was possible to get the data. But we also believe that the institutional and contextual differences between them are an advantage because it allows to test the index in completely different workplaces. At any moment we intended to compare the two. We have changed the presentation of the cases and the results in order to clarify that point. The results show only the institutional reality of each HEI. Each result is not influenced by the the other case study analysis.

Education is one of them, including the distribution of women and men by different fields which are different in the two countries. The two institutional profiles follow different criteria (students teachers and administrative staff in the case of Portugal, but only students and working students in the case of Brazil) for no justified reason.

We have clarified that in the document, in fact it wasn´t clear. The data available differ in the 2 cases but we do have information in the 3 population groups for both institutions and now that is clearly stated.

Another crucial difference relates to gender research, gender knowledge and gender teaching having a very long and strong tradition in Brazilian higher education institutions as opposed to the case of Portugal where the subject was absent from HEI until very recently. This tradition certainly explains the existence of several instruments to assess gender equality in some Brazilian universities, but their emergence conditions are not explained (bottom-up processes ?). On the other hand GEPs introduced in Portugal are clearly linked to a top-down effect by institutional leaderships to access the European funds. 

We agree this is a very interesting point that was missing in the manuscript. We have elaborated on that for both national contexts and added to the desciption of both case studies.

Thanks for the great suggestion!

We also added some data and reflexion about the processes of GE instituitionalisation in both countries.

Another possibility would be to eliminate the validation results and concentrate in (and develop) the first part related to the construction of the instrument which is already much stronger.

For the reasons explained above, we do believe the validation results are a gain for the manuscript. It allows to illustrate the functioning of the índex. We have redone all this part presenting each case isolated, ensuring there is no comparison. Nevertheless we acknowledge that it is very important to test it with more case studies and we will do it in a close future.

Is the content succinctly described and contextualized with respect to previous and present theoretical background and empirical research (if applicable) on the topic? MUST BE IMPROVED

We have carefully reviewed it according to your comments. We have included more references.

- from line53 (however...) until line 63, the text should not be intended

- from line53 (however...) until line 63, the text should not be intended

- and from 85-94 the text should not be intended

- again there are obstacles with intended text , page 6 and 7

The intendation was made by the jornal. We agree that it is does not facilitate the Reading but we have not changed because it is the journal standard.

- the headings are not appropriate. Chapter 1 is sudivided in a) until e). I would suggest to sudivide it into more Chapters and to clarify the purpose of each chapter. Chapter 1 is about the methodological background of the framework. Chapter 2 about the display and theoretical background of the dimensions, chapter 3 about the mathematical model, chapter 4 about the test and finally chapter 6 about the conclusion

We agree that it was confunsing and we changed it. Thanks for your suggestions!

- from line 160 on , I don't understand the listing signs for each paragraph (i) -(iii) and would suggest to delete them

They were writing this way to illustrate the steps undertook. We have changed it to subtitles. We maintain it because we think it is important to identify the sequence of the procedure.

- table 2 is an unnecessary repetition of the listing in the introduction, but ok 

-  figure 2 is not necessary

- table 6 is not necessary. 

- we maintain table 2 because we consider important to recall the choosen indexes providing some more information about it (for example the links).

- we do not agree with this comment. We think that to provide a figure helps understanding the index rationale.

- we have not understand this comment because the content in this table is not presented anywhere else in the text. Do you mean that this information should be in text instead? Or do you mean this content is unnecessary? We left it as it is because we do believe it was fundamental to present the situation in Brazil in terms of GEPs and Gender equality mechanisms existent at HEIs.

- something is wrong in the sentence in line 479-480 "funded by funding"

-          We have corrected it.

- from line 40 up to 45: the explanation why there is a focus only on the binary understanding of gender is quite weak. The explanation should be more improved. It is not sufficient to say, because everybody else does. Are there maybe methodological reasons, too? Or what does the author hinder to put this innovation on his/her agenda

-          We consider this comment very important, thank you! We totally agree and we have inserted an explanation. We hope it is clear.

page 2 (line46-53): there is a long quote, the text should be intended and there is a introducing sentence to this quote missing. Why is there this quote? What does the author whats to tell with it?

-          The initial inverted comma was a typo. All this paragraph was written by the authors except this quotation from UN 2020 “achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls”

- Introduction: here should be set the hint that academia and higher education is a special organised area, there are certain differences between countries that makes it difficult to measure gender equality crossnational, there exist already some literature about it in europe (for example about the "she figures" report from the EU) 

-          We totally agree and we have inserted text about this question.

- this implies also that not all data is in each country and each HEI easily accessable and even if there is undertaken a survey to get the data, this has difficulties in regard of data privacy and the readiness to take part of such a survey

-          We consider this is a central point, important to talk here and also below when presenting and discussing the case studies. We have inserted information and discussion about this. Thanks!

- the literature review should not only be displayed in a table (table 1) it should be a discussion of the art and nature of the literature, the pros and cons of each index and how it could be used to the purpose to value GE in HEI. This is missing and this is a weakness of this contribution in my view

-          We have done the revision of all this literature in the sense you mean but we do not consider relevant to put that level of detail in the manuscript. We present in the detail the reasons why we believe the six chosen are the more adequate which is a summary of our back office work. From our point of view to do what you suggest would increase very much the size of the manuscript without any profit.

- it should be more explained how the authors come to the conclusion to select this 5 dimensions, this is not traceable by the text

-          We agree it was missing. We have added information about it.

- the description of the dimensions is not balanced. there is sometimes like in the first dimension 80% text about the students situation, and only one sentence about teachers. What about adminstrative staff or is the Index only focussing on academic staff and why then students?

-          We agree and we have carefully went through this part of the text trying to identify all the situations where unbalance was present. We have inserted several pieces of information to improve this part.

- It becomes not clear to the reader how the data should be gained to use the index? Is it aimed that the HEI by himself are undertaking surveys? Or is there any international institution who should gather the data and make usage of the index? Espacially about data on salary there will in many countries difficulties to get such data.

One hard issue about the index construction is to obtain the data; for this reason we minimized the data to be acquired without loosing information about the dimension. The institutions are responsible for data acquisition.

- in regard of segregation of gender along the hierarchies and academic fields are the dimensions empowerment and education clear enough distinctive?

We understand your point and we have reviewed the two dimensions accordingly.

- in comparision to the other dimensions, the dimension about violence is not written how this is going to be applied in the index.

We totally agree and it is a dimension with some specificities so we have inserted information not only in data collection but also about the question of violence in HEIs in the 2 countries.

- time dimension: here is literature missing about academic care work, pastoral care in academia, which is highly feminised and devaluaed and a reason for gender inequalities

-          We agree it is a very important point which is being increasingly discussed, also in the pandemic context, so we have inserted references we believe are relevant.

- I am wondering if the mathematical model is appliying appropriate to the dimension health and violence, because the ideal should not be that it is balanced between the genders, it should be that everybody is in good health and nobody faces violence. Here I think is a theoretical weakness to be addressed.

 We consider this comment very important because we want  our positioning in this question to be very clearly stated.

What the authors believe is in the promotion of a better society for all people. With better living conditions for both men and women. So when we highlight the unbalance between men and women for example in terms of violence we do not mean that if the values were more balanced it would be ok. We read a 70% of violence for women in a HEI as a concerning problem for all the community that affects women even more. Besides being the authors positioning this is the standard understanding of the main global indexes. We have carefully reviewed the text from this perspective and made some changes in order to clarify it.

- line 517 are the changes explainable by the pandemic? Or how?

-          The application of the index does not provide explanations for the problems detected. Therefore we can only raise possible causes, it is necessary to develop further research to confirm it. We have inserted some discussion about this and we have stressed the importance of having an index precisely to highlight the emergence and the worsening in the dimensions.

- line 533: I don't see the strong theoretical basis in the contribution. there should be acknowledged more the existing literature about how to measure gender equality in academia and scarved out the specifity of the academic field and crossnational comparisions.

-          We believe that the insertions we have made about these three issues have improved the theoretical basis. The only point we have not added content was in the discussion of the 37 papers on global indexes for the reasons explained above. At this moment we discuss the 6 indexes chosen as reference to our model, the problem of measuring GE at academia and the almost absence of GE instruments for HEIs.