The ERC Scientific Council has established a gender equality plan, based on the view that women and men are equally able to perform excellent frontier research. One of the main goals of this plan, which has been concluded by the ERC gender balance working group,  is to increase the number of female top researchers applying for ERC grants, by means of raising awareness.

Since the creation of the European Research Council, under the Seventh Framework Programme (FP7), scientific excellence is the sole selection criterion in the ERC grant competitions. Gender mainstreaming is another core principle of this investigator-driven funding organisation for frontier research, taking into account that by gender mainstreaming is meant that each process within the ERC - from creating awareness about the ERC to grant signing – is designed to include both genders, giving equal opportunities to men and women.

In 2008, just as the European Commission published its recommendations for the review of ERC mechanism and criteria, the Scientific Council decided to take this a step further by setting up a working group to monitor gender issues more closely. The group has concluded an ERC's gender equality plan which was endorsed by the Scientific Council in December 2010, laying down the objectives in terms of gender equality. 

One of the main goals of the plan is to ensure that excellent female researchers are fully informed and aware of the opportunities that an ERC grant offers. It is also essential to convey a clear message that fairness and equal treatment are fundamental in the ERC grant competitions. Moreover, the plan envisages closer monitoring of the gender distribution within the ERC’s peer review system, striving for balance.

Up to now, around a fifth of the ERC grantees are women in total, with a higher share in the Starting Grant competitions targeted at early-career researchers (26%), than in the Advanced Grant competitions for senior researchers (12%). These relative low shares are partly due to the proportion of women applying to each of the two grant schemes, with an average of 30% in the Starting Grants and 14% in the Advanced Grants. Broadly speaking, these ratios also reflect the proportion of women in research careers in Europe.