The efforts to establish an InterGender consortium, which this agreement codifies have as their background the successful work of InterGender, the Swedish-International Research School in Interdisciplinary Gender Studies, funded by the Swedish Research Council with 12,5 million SEK, 2008-2014. Since its inception, the School has organized 27 international PhD courses in intersectional gender studies as well as three international conferences with a main focus on PhD students’ participation and training. Moreover, sustainable networks with regular workshops for first-phase PhD students have been organized within the framework of InterGender.

InterGender is indebted to a predecessor: The Nordic Research School in Interdisciplinary Gender Studies, NorsGender, funded by NordForsk with 5 million NOK, 2004-2009. NorsGender gathered 40 partner universities in 11 countries, and offered 29 international PhD courses. The School was run in collaboration with the Nordic Institute of Gender Research, Oslo, and an international board. It was very positively mid-term evaluated by an international peer review panel, and the experiences from this School gave impetus to the setting up of InterGender, as well as to a collaboration between the two Schools in the last phase of the NorsGender funding.

InterGender is building on these experiences, as well as on successful experiences of the participating gender research training organizations and schools in Sweden, Norway, Finland, The Netherlands, Germany, and France. Inspirations have also emerged from Athena (The Socrates funded Thematic Network for European curriculum development in Gender Studies, 1998-2009) where many of the NorsGender and InterGender-partners also took actively part in joint PhD- and master level curriculum development. One of the objectives of the InterGender research school has been to make itself permanent beyond the Swedish Research Council grant, and it is this objective to which this consortium agreement proposal is a response, resulting from the development work of the InterGender board, representing all partner units as well as doctoral students, affiliated with the partner organizations.