Introduction 

Gender inequalities in STEM research careers persist across Europe and internationally, despite extensive equality policies and funding conditionalities. Women researchers remain under-represented in senior academic positions, decision-making bodies, and high-visibility research outputs. At the same time, Open Science has gained prominence as a reform agenda intended to democratise knowledge production, enhance transparency, and broaden participation. 

However, evidence increasingly shows that Open Science does not automatically deliver gender equality. When introduced without attention to power relations, workload distribution, career incentives, and institutional culture, OS practices may intensify existing disparities for example, by increasing unpaid labour, reinforcing publication hierarchies, or privileging already well-resourced research groups. 

This article contends that addressing these tensions requires institutionally embedded, participatory processes that enable women staff to shape Open Science implementation from within HEIs. Internal strategy labs offer such a process, moving beyond compliance-driven equality plans toward sustained institutional learning and redesign. 

Structural Barriers to Women’s Participation in STEM and Open Science 

Research on gender inequality in academia highlights recurring obstacles: precarious career pathways, biased evaluation systems, uneven care responsibilities, and exclusion from informal networks. In STEM disciplines, these issues are compounded by masculinised norms of excellence, competition-based funding, and narrow authorship and credit practices. 

Open Science intersects with these dynamics in complex ways. While open access, open data, and collaborative research models can lower entry barriers, they can also: 

• increase expectations for visibility and continuous productivity; 

• shift costs and labour onto individual researchers; 

• reward forms of participation not fully recognised in promotion and assessment systems. 

Without institutional mediation, OS risks becoming an additional layer of expectation rather than a corrective mechanism. 

Why Internal Strategy Labs? 

Internal strategy labs are structured, iterative spaces within HEIs where staff collectively analyse problems, test approaches, and design actionable solutions. When explicitly centred on women staff in STEM, these labs serve multiple purposes: 

1. Knowledge production grounded in lived institutional experience 
   Women staff possess situated knowledge of how policies, evaluation systems, and OS practices operate in practice. Strategy labs formalise this knowledge as a legitimate input into institutional decision-making. 

1. Shift from top-down to co-produced institutional change 
   Evidence from gender equality initiatives shows that externally imposed frameworks often result in symbolic compliance. Strategy labs support shared ownership and reduce resistance by embedding change within institutional routines. 

1. Methodological development, not only policy formulation 
   Labs can generate concrete methodologies guidelines for inclusive OS practices, workload recognition models, participatory governance tools rather than abstract commitments. 

1. Capacity-building and empowerment 
   Participation strengthens women staff’s strategic, leadership, and analytical capacities, contributing to longer-term cultural change beyond the lab itself. 

Contribution to Open Science Reform 

Internal strategy labs offer a structured means to align Open Science with gender equality objectives by: 

• identifying gendered effects of OS practices within specific disciplinary and institutional contexts; 

• designing inclusive participation models that recognise diverse forms of contribution; 

• informing institutional governance, research assessment, and support structures; 

• producing transferable methodologies adaptable across HEIs. 

Importantly, this approach challenges the assumption that openness alone ensures inclusion. Instead, it situates Open Science as a negotiated institutional practice requiring deliberate design choices. 

Conclusion 

Engaging women staff in internal strategy labs represents a methodologically sound and policy-relevant approach to advancing women researchers’ empowered participation in STEM-based Open Science. By combining participatory knowledge production with institutional embedding, such labs address both cultural and structural dimensions of inequality. They offer HEIs a practical pathway to move from declarative commitments toward operational change, ensuring that Open Science contributes to fairness rather than reproducing existing hierarchies. 

References: 

Gender inequality and institutional change in STEM and HEIs 

European Commission (2021). She Figures 2021: Gender in Research and Innovation. 
Publications Office of the European Union. 

European Commission (2022). Reforming Research Assessment: Agreement on Reforming Research Assessment.