Overview
Until a product reaches its final destination, a range of actors are involved: This includes freight forwarder, hauliers, terminal and infrastructure operators, transport companies and persons charged with the transport itself. These persons relate to each other in many different ways. In all these sectors - which also includes accompanying scientific research - women are underrepresented. This leads to the questions, in which areas of these relationships' women could be affected as users at all, which potentials can be shown in a higher incorporation of women in these areas and which suitable rudiments exist to exploit these potentials optimally.
The project EXCHANGES aims to answer these questions. Withal the gender relevance in individual areas of freight transport will be identified and based on this, guidelines for stronger future consideration of gender relevant issues for freight transport will be developed. Primarily the project addresses to the question, in which areas of logistical value-added chain features of people are considered. Thereby professional users on side of service providers are considered as well as users of freight transport and logistic services on demand side. After the identification of person relevant areas of freight transport, it comes to examine which of these sections present gender relevance. Particularly the roles resp. positions which are occupied by women are examined as well as the question to what extent gender relevance in research and development is taken into account.
In this investigation a close cooperation with research facilities of the companies and universities is essential, which will be involved in the project through innovative methods. Following companies will be considered where women already occupy leading positions resp. have exploratory relevant key roles. Thereby it will be examined to what extent the incorporated competence of women leads to innovation in business models, research and management. Further the conditions which positively influenced the integration of women are investigated. The close cooperation with corresponding companies is a central component of the project as well. Conclusively strategies and guidelines will be evolved, which shall lead to an increasing integration of women and gender relevant issues in freight transport particularly with the main focus on FTI projects.
For the implementation of the project the partners Universität für Bodenkultur, Wien (Institut für Verkehrswesen und Institut für Produktionswirtschaft und Logistik) and B-NK GmbH, Büro für nachhaltige Kompetenz) were united. Thus the subjects freight transport and gender can optimally be examined by taking scientific as well as enterprising aspects into consideration.