The Professional Equality Fresco – a new tool for raising awareness of gender bias
Since the start of the year, the CNRS's Mission for Women's Integration has been training a group of facilitators working with the Professional Equality Fresco, a new tool to raise awareness of gender bias in research.
Do you know what a 'boys' club' is? Or the 'model of the good researcher'? Or 'masculine leadership'? You can learn about these concepts from the humanities, social sciences and cognitive sciences by using the Professional Equality Fresco!
This ready-to-use awareness-raising tool on the mechanisms of discrimination and invisibility of women in research was inspired by the Climate Fresk or other collaborative workshops and entirely designed at the CNRS. This new fresco was launched in early 2025 by the Mission for Women's Integration (MPDF) with support from the CNRS Parity and Equality Committee, the network of equality officers in CNRS institutes and regional offices with several researchers involved in validating or enhancing its content before its finalisation in early 2026. The expertise and know-how of Alexis Klein and Roxane de Pelet, the two creators of the Sexism Fresk, were also of benefit in the project's creation process.
'The Professional Equality Fresco is a way of broadly disseminating the culture of equality constructed over the years at the CNRS', explains Elisabeth Kohler, the MPDF's director. To date, around thirty scientific and administrative staff members have already been trained to facilitate working with the fresco. The ultimate goal is to build up an internal pool of facilitators at the CNRS – similar to the network of facilitators for the Climate Fresk and the 'My Earth in 180 minutes' initiative – so this new fresco can be rolled out across French higher education and research. The director of the MPDF assures that this fresco is "backed by solid scientific data and aims to equip the 700 equality officers in our laboratories who can often feel a little helpless in their mission'.
