ProGender aims to promote bilateral activities between Iceland, Greece and Norway by creating a digital hub devoted to gender perspectives of COVID-19 and its aftermath. The activities that will be carried out within the hub will be online and will promote gender perspectives, analyses and policy responses of the COVID-19 crisis through a set of actions and initiatives that enhance cooperation and exchange between Greek, Icelandic and Norwegian institutions.

In the ProGender project the Centre for Gender Studies of Panteion University cooperates with the RIKK- Institute for Gender, Equality and Difference of University of Iceland and the Center for Gender Research of Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU). In Greece, the Centre of Gender Studies collaborates with the Research and Education Collective (reCollective) and the Social Cooperative Enterprise KOINSEP STIN PRIZA.

The aims of ProGender are:

1. to promote understandings of the multiple gender challenges that the coronavirus outbreak has brought into the forefront, including gender-based violence, the intersectional aspects (age, race, migration status) of the spread of the virus, work-life balance especially in relation to increase in telework, and the undervaluation of female-dominated and racialized sectors of employment (such as nursing, cleaning, care and platform work) that remain at the frontline of the struggles for the survival of the healthcare system.
2. to open cross – cultural debates between academics, policy-makers and stakeholders on these emerging issues that have a bearing on gender relations and the future of gender equality in policy making, labour markets and societal developments.
3. to address possible responses to the gendered impact of the post-coronavirus European societies, which include initiatives (workshops and seminars) and deliverables (video, podcasts, reports) targeting specific groups and policy areas in which exchanges and networking between gender experts, stakeholders and policy makers from Iceland, Greece and Norway can make a difference. The responses will also include educational material, consisting of testimonies, articles, publications, videos, and images, which will be collected and processed in a way that can be readily available for educators to use (for example in university or school courses or in training for professionals). The responses will focus on the ways in which gender relations are transformed during the current pandemic, but also on how gender relations are transformed during and post. This broader focus will enable a more in-depth impact of the hub, which may last long after the completion of the project. Thus, different activities will include considerations of the gender aspects of other crises such as wars, famines, recessions, political turmoil. ProGender aims to open up avenues for gender equality in post-coronavirus societies. For this purpose, different deliverables will highlight, in particular examples of important women and women’s groups who have managed to transform post-crisis societies and the obstacles they faced after the end of the exceptional circumstances they lived through.

The ultimate goals will be to develop broader opportunities for sustainable cross-cultural networking and cooperation amongst various actors in Norway, Iceland and Greece and benefiting from ProGender, to share positive paradigms and think about new possible ways of dealing with gender issues after the coronavirus outbreak. In this context, the project will be addressing post-coronavirus prospects for gender equality against the background of previous crises.