Gender Equality & Inclusion
How we treat equity at Future Education.
Entity: Future Education
Registered office: Susa, Italy
Scope: All entities, staff, contractors, facilitators and learners of Future Education across Italy, the European Union, and the United Kingdom.
First adopted: 11 May 2026
Review cycle: Annual, with monitoring report published every 12 months.
Approved by: Thiago Chaer, Founder and Director, and the Future Education Board.
Public link: www.futureeducation.digital/gender-equality-inclusion
1. Statement from the Director
Future Education exists to help higher education institutions navigate change in the era of AI. The institutions we serve are not abstract entities. They are people - faculty, staff, leaders, learners - making decisions that shape who gets to teach, who gets to study, and who gets to lead the next generation of education.
That makes equity a working condition, not a marketing line. If we ask universities to redesign how they hire, promote, evaluate and develop their people, we are obliged to hold ourselves to the same standard - and to make our standard visible.
This Gender Equality Plan sets out the commitments, mechanisms and accountabilities through which Future Education promotes gender equality across its own organisation, its programmes, and the work we do with client institutions. It is a formal commitment of the company. It is signed by the Director. It is reviewed annually. It is public.
We do not treat equity as compliance. We treat it as quality.
Thiago Chaer
Founder and Director, Future Education
2. Purpose and Scope
2.1 Purpose
This document is the Gender Equality Plan (GEP) of Future Education. It is intended to:
Set out our commitment to gender equality and inclusion as a structural principle of the organisation.
Define the concrete actions, indicators and resources through which that commitment is implemented.
Provide a transparent reference for our staff, partners, client institutions, and funders - including those operating under Horizon Europe and other public funding programmes that require a GEP as an eligibility criterion.
2.2 Scope
This Plan applies to:
All employees, founders, directors and members of the Board of Future Education.
All external facilitators, subject-matter experts and contractors engaged in the delivery of Future Education programmes.
All learners participating in cohorts hosted on the Future Education Sandbox, as well as faculty and staff of client institutions during the delivery of our academies and consulting engagements.
All recruitment, procurement, vendor selection, partnership and outreach activities conducted in the name of Future Education.
2.3 Working definitions
In this Plan, “gender equality” refers to the equal rights, responsibilities, opportunities and treatment of people of all genders. Equity is the means - structural adjustments that account for different starting points - through which equality becomes operational rather than rhetorical. We address gender alongside other dimensions that intersect with it, including ethnicity, nationality, age, disability, caring responsibilities, language and socio-economic background.
3. Governance and Accountability
Future Education is a small, deliberately structured company. Our governance for equality reflects that: clear ownership at the top, distributed accountability across functions, and external review when our own perspective is insufficient.
3.1 Director-level accountability
The Founder and Director of Future Education holds ultimate accountability for the implementation of this Plan. She signs the Plan, approves the annual monitoring report, and is personally accountable for any decision that affects the organisation’s compliance with it.
3.2 Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) Lead
Future Education designates an internal EDI Lead. The Lead is responsible for:
Coordinating the annual data collection and monitoring exercise.
Triaging concerns raised through our whistleblowing and grievance channels related to gender, harassment or discrimination.
Maintaining the action plan in section 6 and reporting progress to the Director and Board.
Briefing facilitators and partners on the obligations set out in this document.
In a company of our current size, the EDI Lead role is held by a named member of the leadership team and supported by external advisors where specialist expertise is required (for example, on legal interpretation, sexual harassment investigation, or accessibility audits).
3.3 Board oversight
The Board of Future Education reviews this Plan and its monitoring report annually. The Board is empowered to require corrective action where indicators show that the Plan is not delivering its stated outcomes.
4. The Four Mandatory Requirements
This Plan is structured to meet the four mandatory process-related requirements set out by the European Commission for Gender Equality Plans under Horizon Europe. We treat these as a minimum threshold, not a ceiling.
4.1 A public, signed and adopted document
This Plan is:
A formal document of Future Education.
Signed by the Founder and Director and adopted by the Board on the date indicated on the cover page.
Published on the institutional website at www.futureeducation.digital/gender-equality-plan.
Actively communicated within the organisation, including in induction materials for new staff, contractor onboarding, facilitator briefings, and proposals to client institutions.
All previous versions of this Plan, once superseded, will remain accessible from the same page so that the evolution of the document is auditable.
4.2 Dedicated resources
Future Education commits dedicated resources to the implementation of this Plan. Specifically:
Named ownership at director level, as set out in section 3.
An annual operating budget line in the company accounts for: external training on gender equality and unconscious bias; legal and specialist advice on harassment and discrimination matters; accessibility improvements to our learning platform and materials; and the publication and translation of this Plan and its monitoring reports.
Protected working time for the EDI Lead and the Director to discharge their responsibilities under this Plan.
These resources are reviewed and confirmed in the company’s annual budgeting cycle.
4.3 Data collection and monitoring
Future Education collects and reviews sex- and gender-disaggregated data on the populations relevant to its work, on a strictly voluntary self-declaration basis and in compliance with the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and applicable Italian data protection law. The data we collect includes:
Headcount and role distribution of staff, founders, board members and contracted facilitators.
Compensation ranges by role and seniority, used to monitor gender pay gaps within our own organisation.
Recruitment funnel data: applicants, shortlisted candidates, hires.
Participation data for our cohorts: learners enrolled, completion rates, and outcomes of capstone proposals submitted at the end of each programme.
Speaker, facilitator and subject-matter expert composition in our public events and content.
This data is reviewed by the EDI Lead at least quarterly and reported in aggregate, anonymised form in the annual monitoring report. We do not publish individual-level data.
4.4 Training and awareness raising
Training is treated as a working tool of the company, not a one-off event. All staff, founders and contracted facilitators of Future Education are required to complete:
An induction module on this Plan, on our anti-harassment policy, and on the channels through which concerns can be raised.
Annual refresher training on unconscious bias and inclusive practice, tailored to the responsibilities of the role (hiring, facilitation, content design, client management).
Targeted training for those involved in cohort facilitation on inclusive learning design, the gender dimension in case studies, and the management of group dynamics in mixed cohorts.
Training completion is tracked and reported in the annual monitoring report. Clients and partners may request, in good faith, evidence that the facilitators assigned to their programme have completed the required training.
5. Recommended Content Areas
Beyond the four mandatory requirements, this Plan addresses the five thematic areas recommended by the European Commission for GEPs in research and innovation organisations.
5.1 Work-life balance and organisational culture
Future Education operates as a distributed, multi-jurisdictional organisation. Our working norms reflect that:
Default to asynchronous communication. Meetings are scheduled with awareness of school hours, religious observances and time zones across Italy, Brazil, the United Kingdom and elsewhere.
Flexible working as a baseline, not an exception. Parents, carers, and those with health conditions are not required to disclose details in order to access flexibility.
Parental and caring leave aligned with the more generous of: the statutory entitlement in the worker’s country of residence, or the standards set in this Plan, whichever is more favourable to the worker.
A zero-tolerance position on out-of-hours expectations as a tool of performance management.
5.2 Gender balance in leadership and decision-making
Future Education was founded and is led by a woman with two decades of academic and operational leadership experience. The company does not consider that founding fact a substitute for ongoing vigilance about who is in the room when decisions are made. We commit to:
Publishing the gender composition of our leadership team, board, and senior facilitators in the annual monitoring report.
Maintaining diverse shortlists for any leadership recruitment, with documented rationale where a final hire does not reflect the diversity of the shortlist.
Avoiding all-male panels at events we organise or co-host.
5.3 Gender equality in recruitment and career progression
Our recruitment, evaluation and promotion processes are built around structured, criterion-referenced assessment rather than informal judgement. Specifically:
Job descriptions are reviewed for gendered language and for unnecessary requirements that may have a disparate impact.
Salary ranges are published with job postings.
Interviews follow a written rubric agreed before candidates are seen.
Promotion and contract-renewal decisions are documented against role criteria, not against subjective assessments of “fit.”
Performance reviews include an explicit check on whether opportunities for visibility, leadership and development have been distributed equitably across the team.
5.4 The gender dimension in our content and methodology
Future Education designs learning programmes for higher education professionals. Our content reflects equity in substance, not only in framing:
Case studies, examples and data used in our academies draw on a diverse range of institutions, geographies and protagonists.
Where we cite research, we attend to the under-representation of women and non-binary scholars in source lists and rebalance where the literature allows.
Our methodology - Reveal, Build, Propose, Operate - explicitly asks participants to surface assumptions in their institutional processes, including assumptions about gender, that may be embedded in workflow design, hiring criteria, scheduling and student support.
Our seven-competency framework treats Critical Thinking, Collaborative Intelligence and Social-Emotional Resilience as first-order capabilities, not as soft additions, recognising their role in identifying and counteracting bias in institutional decision-making.
5.5 Prevention of gender-based violence, including sexual harassment
Future Education maintains a separate, more detailed Anti-Harassment and Whistleblowing Policy, available at www.futureeducation.digital/whistleblowing. In summary:
Sexual harassment, gender-based violence and retaliation against those who report them are explicitly prohibited and constitute grounds for termination of employment or contract.
Multiple reporting channels are available: directly to the Director, to the EDI Lead, through the whistleblowing platform, or through an external investigator where the complaint concerns a member of leadership.
Reports are treated confidentially. Reporters and witnesses are protected from retaliation as a matter of policy, in line with Italian Legislative Decree 24/2023 implementing EU Directive 2019/1937 (the Whistleblowing Directive).
Where an incident occurs in the context of a client engagement, Future Education will cooperate with the client’s own procedures while maintaining its independent obligation to act.
6. Action Plan and Key Indicators
The actions below give effect to the commitments set out in sections 4 and 5. They are reviewed annually and updated in the monitoring report.
Year-on-year indicators tracked and reported
Gender composition of the company (staff, leadership, Board, contracted facilitators).
Gender pay gap, calculated as median and mean compensation by role band.
Conversion rates at each stage of the recruitment funnel, disaggregated by gender.
Cohort participation: enrolment, completion, and capstone outcomes.
Training completion rates across the obligations set out in section 4.4.
Number and nature of concerns raised, investigations opened, and outcomes (in aggregate, anonymised form).
Speaker and facilitator composition at Future Education events and content channels.
Standing actions
Publish the annual monitoring report on the same page as this Plan.
Review and update job descriptions, salary bands and assessment rubrics before each hiring cycle.
Audit a sample of our learning materials each year for inclusive language, representation, and the gender dimension of case studies.
Conduct an annual review of our suppliers and partners against minimum equality standards.
Refresh the Anti-Harassment and Whistleblowing Policy at least every two years, or sooner if legislation changes.
7. Reporting, Review and Amendment
This Plan is reviewed at least once every twelve months. The review covers:
Whether the indicators in section 6 have moved in the intended direction, and if not, why.
Whether the resources committed in section 4.2 remain adequate.
Whether new legal requirements, audit findings or stakeholder feedback require amendment.
Whether the Plan continues to reflect the actual operating practice of the company.
Substantive amendments are approved by the Director and adopted by the Board. The amended Plan is republished with a clear changelog, and the previous version remains accessible on the same page.
8. Contact and Reporting Channels
Questions about this Plan, requests for clarification by clients and funders, and reports of conduct inconsistent with it can be directed through any of the following channels:
General enquiries: hi@futureeducation.digital
EDI Lead and confidential reporting: edi@futureeducation.digital
Whistleblowing platform: www.futureeducation.digital/whistleblowing
Director, for matters concerning members of the leadership team: director@futureeducation.digital
Future Education does not consider any report made in good faith under this Plan to be unwelcome, regardless of its conclusion.
Signed and adopted
On behalf of Future Education as a formal commitment of the company.