Gender Equality Office has collaborated with Asst. Prof. Başak Can Bulut from the College of Social Sciences and Humanities, Asst. Prof. İlker Kayı, Prof. Sibel Sakarya and University College Cork to secure a seed fund from the UNIC Alliance. The funding is for a project on gender mainstreaming in medical education, and the seed fund will provide small-scale support to develop engaged research collaborations and projects across all disciplines.

Despite the feminization of the healthcare workforce over the last decades, gender equality in medicine is still lacking, with women experiencing explicit and implicit forms of gender discrimination and sexism during medical education and clinical practice.

The project will create an interdisciplinary network of scholars and researchers working at the intersection of health, medical education, and gender to develop tools to mainstream gender in medical education. The research will explore evidence-based and novel methodologies to incorporate a gender perspective into medical education and will aim to apply for a grant that removes barriers to creating a less sexist and more egalitarian medical training.

The project partners will include medical doctors specializing in public health, gender, and medical education, a medical anthropologist, and a gender equality coordinator at Koç University. The team is diverse and inclusive, composed of scholars from various fields and seniorities, and aims to incorporate medical school students in future research project designs to develop novel and participatory training tools for doctors to embrace gender perspectives in their medical practice, teaching, and research.

This project is the first engaged research project that the Gender Equality Office is actively participating in, and the collaboration between the various departments involved highlights the importance of inter-departmental and transdisciplinary collaboration in tackling societal challenges.