Problems of defining gender parity in the academic environment of Ukraine

The article addresses the problems of forming gender parity in the academic environment. The concept of the academic environment is defined as a set of educational institutions, research facilities, scientific self-governing organizations, and their personnel who are in a legal relationship with specific organizations (institutions) and bear legal responsibility for complying with the requirements established for their positions (types of activity). The possibilities of applying the UNESCO Gender Parity Index (GPI) to assess gender disparities in the academic environment are analyzed. It has been established that the concept of gender parity in the academic environment can be understood in several aspects. In the statistical-quantitative aspect, it represents a state of balance between the number of women and men in educational and research institutions, measured using the Gender Parity Index (GPI) as the ratio of females to males, where a value of 1.0 signifies complete equality. The concept of gender parity in the hierarchical-structural aspect can be understood as the absence of vertical segregation and glass ceiling barriers, which ensures proportional representation of both sexes at all levels of professional development: from students and junior academic staff to senior management positions in higher education and research institutions, as well as membership in the presidiums of national academies of sciences. In the legal aspect, gender parity should be understood as the existence of a legal framework for forming and maintaining gender balance in the academic environment, which involves the use of differentiated indicators at various levels of management in the fields of education and science. The main problems associated with the formation of gender parity in the academic environment include: the imperfection of the existing legal and methodological toolkit, which does not provide for differentiation according to the levels of the academic hierarchy; the presence of vertical gender segregation trends, for which obtaining valid and reliable information requires covering all subjects of the academic environment; and the lack of open information on the results of gender analysis of academic subjects conducted during the evaluation of their activities by authorized public authorities.