The papers in this collection have provided answers to many important questions about the status of women and men in various areas of activity – politics, science, the economy, and society – and in more detail in creative and innovative activity. Although the results of the analysis could be used in a number of thematic discussions, the authors treat them primarily as a contribution to the study of the influence of gender relations on the creative and innovative activities of men and women. The research results summarized in this monograph are part of the ‘Innovative Gender’ as a New Source of Progress (InnoGend) project conducted by a team of researchers from the Jagiellonian University, the University of Warsaw, and Ostfold University College. One of the project's main research questions is: whether and how gender can contribute to the growth of social creativity and the development of innovation, and whether in any dimension support of innovative activity is reflected in state policy. It may be assumed that if the policy of promoting creativity and innovation is neutral in terms of gender roles, this means that either gender does not matter in the innovation process, or that the impact of gender in this process is avoided. Highlighting the positive (or negative) relationships between gender and the creativity and innovativeness of men and women may indeed be helpful in the search for new sources of progress.

The need to define the most important categories of gender and its “environment” thus arises from the specifics of the project. Gender is a time-variable social phenomenon, constituting the superstructure of biological sex, which is reduced to a set of traits, behaviours, attitudes, roles and attributes assigned by the wider culture to one sex and expected by society, appropriately from a woman or a man, as well as the closely related relationships between them, which includes a hierarchy. Gender is rooted in social institutions, which translates on the one hand into a lack of awareness, and on the other to its variability over time (Magdalena Jaworek and Anna Zachorowska-Mazurkiewicz).

In economics in defining the categories of gender the main emphasis is on the disclosure of new reserves and incentives for development – on local and global levels. Increasing participation of women in economy and society is a real action, revealing unexploited gains, which sophisticated mathematical models cannot grasp.