Women Making Waves

The high unemployment rates in Europe and the gender gap is still existent to this day. These are two of the main challenges faced by the women of the 21st century. What is more, in most cases the challenges do not simply stop there; the majority of women are double disadvantaged as they usually have to cope with additional difficulties in their daily life, such as NEET or migrant profile, single parent, disabled, early career stages or returning to work after a long absence.

All these factors put obstacles in their professional path and career advancement, thus impeding progression in their field.

The “Women Making Waves – Enhancing Female Leadership Skills” project aims to raise awareness about this phenomenon by empowering double disadvantaged women to develop their leadership skills and strengths.

The goal is to make them more aware of the disproportionate number of women in leadership roles and encourage them to break this pattern and “make waves”.

IO1 Women Making Waves Competence Framework

In order to identify the skills needed for double disadvantaged women to pursue leadership positions and increase their leadership skills, the partnership will develop the Women Making Waves Competence Framework. It will analyse the current initiatives and projects promoting female leadership among the target group. This will ensure that the Women Making Waves Training Programme and Leader Circles ™ are designed in such a way that is of the highest benefit to the women participating in the training.

You can find the competence framework HERE!

IO2 Women Making Waves training programme – Enhancing Female Leadership Skills

In the Women Making Waves Training Programme will be developed aiming to foster female leadership skills and strength and build double disadvantage women’s (NEET, migrant, disabled, in early career stages, women returning to work after a long absence or those pursuing a new career path) self-belief and confidence for employability. The training programme will aim to address the needs to help their career progression.

IO3 Leader Circles™

The CirclesTM are comprised of 4-5 mentees in a group who meet with a facilitator for 3-4 sessions, each lasting up to 4 hours (Annex “Circles Methodology”). The goal and innovation of the CirclesTM methodology is that the mentees do not only learn from their facilitator but mostly from each other in order to achieve a mutual objective which, in the case of Women Making Waves, is aimed at increasing women’s confidence, self-awareness and knowledge of employability, business and leadership opportunities by sharing their stories with each other.

IO4 Women Making Waves E-learning Academy

Women Making Waves Academy – containing the online adaptation of the training materials that are to be developed as part of IO2 and IO3 as well as other related OERs and MOOCs building on this information. Face-to-face training participants will be able to access extra materials in between the sessions. Target group members and other interested parties who are not able or not eligible to attend the face-to-face training will be able to engage in the training programme and take full advantage of all content developed. It will include video materials, documents, interactive learning scenarios and slideshows to increase user-engagement.

IO5 Policymakers Guide “Women Making Waves – Enhancing Female Leadership Skills”

The partnership will therefore develop a Policymakers Guide targeting policymakers, businesses, formal and non-formal educational institutions, migrant and women support organisations and other stakeholders across Europe. The Guide sets out to emphasise the need of having more women in leadership positions to use the available human resources in Europe to its fullest potential and to increase the competitiveness of its internal market.