Female Empowerment in
Science and Tecnology Academia
Handbook On Resistance
To Gender Equality In Academia
Festa Resistance And Gender Main Causes & Indicators Main Forms & Symptoms Recommendations Analysis Of Stories Conclusion & References
This online handbook aims to present a deeper understanding of resistance to structural change to gender equality in academic institutions and the ways of dealing with it.

It is concerned with forms, directions, and aspects of resistance coming from men and women as well as the organizations, and the ways resistance operates (FESTA, 2012). For the purposes of the handbook, all resistance incidents encountered by the partner institutions during the course of FESTA project have been recorded and analyzed. We have agreed to include here 31 of these narratives summarizing what has worked well and what barriers have been experienced along the process of change towards gender equality in the member institutions of FESTA. We have also composed a list of recommendations for dealing with a variety of possible resistance incidents along the process of change. The references section is expected to be useful to the reader interested in further reading in the area.
This handbook is addressed to change agents and researchers engaged in gender equality projects both in academic and non-academic institutions. It also targets anyone engaged in a change process in any subject area since the handbook also covers some of the general types of resistance which are not directly related to gender issues.  
It is expected to be useful to change agents because resistance is an inevitable part of the change process. Anyone who would like to create change in an environment needs to reduce the barriers as well as recognize the strategies to do this. Studying manifestations of resistance within institutions can answer this call by identifying both the blockages in the implementation of gender mainstreaming and the reasons for limited gender change (Cavaghan forthcoming, 2015; Lombardo and Mergaert, 2013; Mergaert and Lombardo, 2014).
Inspired by the information gathered from the existing literature we first try to present a framework of resistance defining the concept as it is used in the study and explaining how gender intersects with it. In the next section, we focus on the main causes and the indicators as well as the forms and symptoms of resistance. The following section concerns counteracting resistance and lists recommendations for handling resistance. In the section analyzing the collected data an attempt is made to diagnose the forms, causes and actors of the resistance incidents encountered during the FESTA project as well as the suggested strategies to use in each case. In the discussion and conclusions section the implications of the analysis of the resistance incidents are summarized.