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The POLICY ANSWERS team from the Foundation for Management and industrial research, Gabriela Kostovska Bogoeska, Executive director and Emilija Andonova, Programme coordinator recently travelled to Munich to participate in herCAREER, Europe’s leading career & networking platform for women & youth, held on October 9-10, 2025. The event, which combines a career fair, conferences, mentoring, and networking opportunities, provided an invaluable opportunity for the project team to deepen its work on gender equality, diversity, and inclusive innovation policies.
As part of its mandate to support evidence-based policy making and foster inclusive innovation, POLICY ANSWERS aims to ensure that gender equality is more than an item on policy checklists—it must feature in the design, evaluation, and implementation of policies across sectors. Participating in herCAREER aligns directly with several of the project’s objectives:
- Understanding lived experiences and barriers: herCAREER offers panels, lectures, and workshops led by women who share first-hand their career trajectories, obstacles, and successes. Listening to these voices supports POLICY ANSWERS’s efforts to ground its policy recommendations in real‐world evidence.
- Connecting stakeholders: The event brought together corporations, start-ups, academia, civil society, human resources experts, and role models. POLICY ANSWERS team members were able to engage with employers and innovators interested in structural equality and inclusive hiring, enriching potential partnerships and informing the policy side of innovation ecosystems.
- Learning best practices and fresh ideas: The herCAREER Academy and its online content showcase successful institutional practices (from mentorship programs to inclusive recruitment, to workplace cultures) that have demonstrably reduced gender bias. These are the kinds of case studies POLICY ANSWERS can adapt or recommend in its country‐level policy frameworks.
During the herCAREER fair, the POLICY ANSWERS team immersed themselves in a wide range of activities designed to enhance their understanding and engagement with gender equality and inclusion in the innovation ecosystem. They attended inspiring lectures and panel discussions focused on gender, diversity in leadership, and the ways in which organizational structures can both challenge and perpetuate inequality. These sessions provided the team with valuable data, theoretical frameworks, and practical strategies for developing more gender-aware policies.
Beyond the conference rooms, the team also held bilateral meetings with role models, women in leadership positions, and diversity and inclusion officers from various companies. These exchanges offered important insights into how businesses across Europe are translating EU and national regulations on gender equality and inclusive innovation into practice, as well as the challenges they continue to face.
In addition, the POLICY ANSWERS representatives explored numerous exhibition booths showcasing companies with strong representation of women in technology, leadership, and research and development. Observing the policies and practices that have contributed to these successes will help the team identify evidence-based examples to feature in upcoming policy guidelines and briefs.
Finally, the event provided an excellent opportunity for networking with peers involved in similar initiatives. Through these conversations, the team exchanged knowledge and experiences on monitoring and evaluating gender equality policies, developing tools for assessing inclusion, and creating effective strategies for engaging underrepresented groups in innovation processes.
Because of this participation, the team anticipates gains in several key areas. The experience at herCAREER is expected to lead to enhanced policy recommendations, as the team now has access to richer data drawn from real-life experiences that can help refine and strengthen advice for national and regional policymakers on gender inclusion in innovation systems. New collaborations are also on the horizon, as the contacts established with companies, universities, and NGOs during the event may evolve into pilot initiatives, case studies, or joint activities that expand the visibility and impact of the POLICY ANSWERS project.
In addition, the team’s presence at such a high-profile forum reinforces the project’s visibility and credibility as a serious contributor to shaping gender‐aware innovation policy. This recognition can help attract further interest from relevant stakeholders and potential funders. Finally, the participation served as valuable capacity building for the team members, who gained fresh perspectives, practical tools, and analytical frameworks to better understand institutional cultures, identify policy gaps, and drive not only policy improvements but also deeper structural change.
The trip to herCAREER in Munich has already proven highly valuable to POLICY ANSWERS—not just as participation in a major event, but as a wellspring of ideas, connections, and leverage points that will help advance more equitable innovation ecosystems across Europe.
