The application of a gender approach on CETRA’s development and evaluation is closely connected to the recent but binding development with the Gender Mainstreaming approach and concept, that differs from the better known Equal Opportunities approach, and it is defined as: “Systematic integration of mutual issues, women & men priorities and needs in all politics, with the aim to promote women and men equality. Mobilizing all politics and activities in order to get and realize equality, taking into account, starting from the planning phase, in an open and active manner of their effects on the women and men situations during the on-going, the monitoring and the assessment.”

Gender approach adapted by CETRA is no doubt an innovative element of the Project, because of several reasons.

First, it concerns the central field of interest, regarding complexity in e-learning. From this point of view, CETRA’s intervention field offers a privileged and innovative framework for gender topics.

E-learning has been developing very much in the last decade, concerning communication and information technology as well as training strategies and contents. Complexity in e-learning modules for trainers is innovative itself and the gender approach in e-learning courses has been scarcely applied up to now. The gender approach in training projects is more often focused on equal opportunities for women and men in attending courses; at other times it consists in planning modules on equal opportunities or gender diversities inside courses directed to increasing skills in H.R. management. CETRA aims at doing that too, but it’s mostly developing a strong attention to gender in any phase and in any activities included in the Project, ranging from the criteria to be used in analysing cases of innovative organizations (private and public ones) in partner countries, to the results dissemination plan.

Therefore, CETRA partnership has tried and identified gender variables and gender indexes in each main activity of CETRA Projects such as planning, production, monitoring and evaluation. It’s hasn’t been an easy task. It has been a very interesting and innovative one though.CETRA targets are human resources managers, trainers, consultants, R&D managers, people who work for and with other people. In other words, they are men and women that work with men and women.

The key concept of the gender approach in CETRA is that gender diversities can be looked at as an important variable of complexity which interact with others in social system and in complex organization, an elementwhich managers and trainers have to cope with when managing human resources; when managing different people often expressing different knowledge, attitudes, competences, needs and interests, depending also on social contest and gender roles in society, in family, in labour market, in company organizations.

Facing complexity in social systems, in companies and in training activities means also facing gender diversities; so we assumed those diversities as:

• Generally present
• Relevant in order to understand complexity
• Changing in time and contest
• Connected with all other items in CETRA Project

Nowadays this approach is well known by equal opportunities skilled people (women more than men) and clearly defined in official European documents and national laws: however it isn’t sufficiently implemented in project practices yet, except for the ones financed by FSE Mis. E, specifically aimed at equal opportunities. Therefore CETRA’s gender approach tests a pilot methodology, stemming from solutions discussed and accepted among the partnership. CETRA whole partnership itself has faced this approach for the first time, and most partners had never adopted before a gender approach in a formal way. On this respect too, innovation in the project methodology and contents will be reflected in a common in-depth growth among European partners. On this respect the importance and the opportunity to have an active deal between different CETRA countries partners arises, in order to point out the incidence of social, cultural and organizational variables on gender differences in its cause and effect relation with innovation processes.

The CETRA results and mainly the CETRA methodological path will be, in our opinion, very useful in order to evaluate both effectiveness and weakness of the solutions adopted in gender mainstreaming thought as “all efforts able to ensure that all general activities (during their preparation, management, mid-term review and assessment of their impact) take care in an explicit and direct manner of gender diversities and of effects over gender condition”.

Such innovative topics found application in the CETRA Gender Plan and the attention to gender was embraced as one of the main “innovation indexes to be reached by CETRA in the framework of actions for the lifelong development of competencies and qualifications” and was expressed in the question “How the attention to gender is credible and self-consistent?”