Ableism: Discrimination, prejudice, or bias against individuals with disabilities, often manifesting as societal attitudes, policies, or practices that devalue people with physical, mental, intellectual, or sensory disabilities.
Age bias: Prejudice or favoritism based on an individual’s age, typically disadvantageous to younger or older individuals in recruitment, promotions, or treatment.
Bias:
Conscious Bias: When individuals are aware of and may act upon deliberately, often influenced by personal beliefs, prejudices, or stereotypes.
Unconscious Bias: Biases individuals are unaware of, often formed through societal norms or experiences. These can subtly influence decisions without conscious realization.
Bias in the Evaluation of Research: Biases in evaluation processes are systematic tendencies that distort fairness or objectivity when assessing people, ideas, or performances.
Disciplinary bias: A preference or disadvantage based on academic or professional disciplines, often valuing some fields (like STEM) over others (like the humanities).
Ethnic origin: Ethnic and national origins are mutable grounds, comprising nationality, colour, descent, minority religion, minority language, minority culture and traditions. Together with foreign and immigrant, these characteristics constitute the most common proxies of ethnic origin – most clearly borne out in the context of data collection on inequalities, which is decidedly based on these proxies.
When handled responsibly, such data can promote equality by providing evidence of discrimination and improving policies, while respecting individuals’ self-identification and privacy. Proper safeguards and ethical use are essential to turn this practice into a tool for fairness and inclusion, rather than a risk to personal freedoms.
Gender: A multidimensional construct that links gender identity (a core element of a person’s individual sense of self), gender expression, and social and cultural expectations about status, characteristics, and behaviour that are associated with sex traits. Gender traditionally refers to a social and cultural construct of being a man or a woman. However, some people do not identify within the gender binary of man/woman. Gender exists independently of sex, and an individual’s gender does not always correspond with the sex assigned at birth.
Gender Bias: A tendency to prioritize one gender over others, depending on the context and stereotypes, in hiring, evaluation, and other decision-making processes.
Gender Budgeting: European Commission-recommended tool to promote transparency about gender equality—in which institutions are invited to collect gender-disaggregated data and use it to monitor and make informed decisions.
Gender Training: Introduce video training for evaluation committees to raise awareness about conscious and unconscious bias. The training should include strategies to mitigate the effects of these biases during evaluation procedures.
Homophobic Bias: Prejudice or discriminatory attitudes toward individuals based on their sexual orientation, often manifesting as negative assumptions, stereotypes, or behaviors towards LGBTQ+ people.
IAT (Implicit Association Test): Self-assessment tools to help evaluators identify and measure levels of their own unconscious biases. Test results should remain personal and anonymous to encourage honest reflection by evaluators, before assessment, and mitigate potential sources of discrimination.
Institutional Prestige Bias: Favoring individuals or work associated with prestigious institutions, potentially overlooking merit or quality due to institutional affiliation.
Intersectional Bias: Complex biases that arise from the intersection of the multiple social identities which can compound discrimination or disadvantages.
Linguistic Bias: Discrimination based on language or accents, which can affect individuals' credibility or perceived intelligence, often disadvantaging non-native speakers or those with regional accents.
Mentoring Programs: Initiatives that pair less experienced individuals with mentors to support career growth and reduce biases, including gender bias, by fostering equitable access to guidance and opportunities.
Narrative CV: Structured written account in which researchers can showcase their relevant achievements, professional experiences and skills. This story format gives a better view of a person’s broad range of contributions in context.
Racial/Ethnic Bias: Biases based on race or ethnicity, leading to unequal treatment, representation, or opportunities for individuals from certain racial or ethnic backgrounds.
RFO (Research Funding Organization): An institution or entity that provides financial support for research activities. These organizations fund research projects, typically through grants, fellowships, or other funding schemes.
Research Community: Scientific community made by individuals, organizations, or entities connected by shared interests of research, goals, or disciplines, which typically evaluates research products, and selects people for hiring process and career advancement in the field of reference.
Research Evaluation/Assessment: The evaluation of research outputs for recruitment, career progression, professional habilitation and research funding purposes. Research evaluation can vary in scope and indicators depending on the organization. Usually, research is evaluated by both RPOs and RFOs. RFOs in particular evaluate research for the purpose of distributing research funding.
Research Excellence: Each institution rewards research, and therefore promotes career advancement, based on how it defines excellence. Defining it clearly allows you to give an impartial evaluation of the re-research. There are different ways to evaluate it, such as h-index, number of publications, quality of research, etc. Sometimes, excellence is defined in a biased way—for example, by favoring quantity over quality or by discouraging researchers with career gaps, which often affects women due to maternity leave or family-care responsibilities that culturally fall more heavily on them.
Researchers' Advocate: Role or office dedicated to supporting researchers by addressing their concerns, advocating for their rights, and helping resolve issues that may arise in their professional environment.
RPO (Research Performing Organization): An institution or entity that conducts research, such as universities, research institutes, or laboratories. These organizations are directly involved in the generation of new knowledge and innovation.
Sex Assigned at Birth: The sex that is assigned to a person at birth, typically based on the infant’s external anatomy.
Social Media Evaluation Metrics: Research indicators based on social media activities, belonging to the category of metrics called Altmetrics.
Socio-economic bias: is the systematic advantage or disadvantage given to individuals based on their socio-economic status
Well-being in a Work Setting: Employees' mental, emotional, and physical health, along with job satisfaction and a positive work environment.