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Higher education and research and innovation in Europe continue to suffer from an indefensible waste of female talent and gender inequality. The European Commission recommends that these organizations adopt gender equality plans (GEPs) and other initiatives for institutional change. However, the levels of readiness, expertise, and experience with such interventions are wide-ranging across institutions and member states, thus collaborative approaches might be particularly valuable. Drawing on the experiences of transnational and multi-institutional communities of practice (CoPs) for gender equality (GE), we illuminate how the CoP approach supported change agents, who leveraged CoP membership to respond to challenges in promoting GE initiatives. Being part of collaborative, co-designed CoPs for learning, knowledge sharing, and institutional change provided external support to the change agents' activism and allowed them to build legitimacy around GE work. CoP members leveraged this support through learning opportunities, knowledge transfer, sharing practice, political support, and solidarity from the CoP stakeholders. Findings also show that when CoPs were transnational, multiinstitutional, and interdisciplinary, their heterogeneity did raise some challenges in relation to the divergence of members' contexts and geopolitical idiosyncrasies and that this should be considered when designing CoPs which transcend national and institutional boundaries.

Despite the fact that the topic of "women in research and innovation" has been on the agenda for decades and numerous measures have been implemented at both national and supranational levels to improve gender equality in research and innovation systems, it is still unclear which measures and under which conditions these measures are most effective. Even less research has been carried out on the effects of better representation of women in terms of research and innovation. This paper is based on the application of an innovative evaluation framework, which encompasses complexity and theory of change approaches and aims at exploring the link between interventions and their subsequent effects to two case studies. We discuss two major German flagship programmes aiming at increasing the participation of female researchers in the science system, the "Women Professorship Programme" and the "Pact for Research and Innovation". Through the two programmes, we tested and validated the evaluation framework and its indicators. As part of the validation process, a theory of change has been developed for each of the programmes. The theory-based evaluation approach helped not only to identify gender equality impacts but also broader effects on research and innovation that might have otherwise remained undetected. We studied the effects of the two programmes on the number of women in leadership positions and analysed whether an increase in the proportion of women leaders influences publication patterns. Although linear linkages are challenging to establish due to the complexity of the process, the findings suggest that the flagship programmes have contributed not only to higher shares of women researchers but also to improved female publication and citation rates. There are clear benefits for Germany in terms of scientific results from the increased proportion of female researchers in research and innovation.

This article provides an overview of the theoretical assumptions, methods, and key results from the Evaluation Framework for Promoting Gender Equality in Research and Innovation (EFFORTI) project, which was funded by the European Commission. The purpose of EFFORTI was to analyse the impact of interventions to promote gender equality in research and innovation (R&I), and to establish criteria for more responsible and responsive research and innovation (RRI) systems in Europe. This article provides an overview of the project's main results and the lessons learnt from the empirical analysis of R&I systems in several European countries and a comparison of 19 gender equality intervention measures.