Imagine a university asking students to submit a written assignment about reading a book. Many submit it. Few have read it. All pass the course. The system works, some would say. I would say the system pretends to work, which is not the same. Something similar happens with the gender equality plans that Horizon Europe (the European Commission's 2021-2027 research funding program) requires research centers and universities to have as a condition for accessing European funding.For the first time in the history of European research framework programmes, having an equality plan in force is a requirement. For this plan, the Commission set 4 mandatory elements: a public document signed by management, dedicating resources to it, sex and gender disaggregated data, and training for staff. And, in parallel, it recommended addressing 5 areas: work-life balance, equity in leadership, equality in hiring and professional careers, the integration of the gender perspective in research and teaching, and measures against gender-based violence. On paper, it is a lever for structural change. On paper.The problem is that the requirement has created, in some contexts, only a formal compliance. Organizations that hastily draft the document. Plans that no one has consulted with staff or students. Commitments without deadlines, training sessions attended only by the convinced. The letter of the regulation, complete. The spirit, absent. And the Commission knows it: it has already announced adjustments for this year (without waiting for the new framework program) to verify its real compliance.It is very clear that we are talking about institutional culture. And changing the culture of an institution requires leadership to assume it as a real priority, not as an external obligation. It assumes that all personnel, from the newest to the management positions, understand why equality improves the quality of science. Research has repeatedly shown that diversity in teams produces more solid science, more interesting questions are asked, and biases that homogeneous teams do not see are detected. When a clinical trial does not stratify by sex, or when an algorithm is trained with data that overrepresent a profile, the results are, at best, incomplete. At worst, harmful.Let's return to students and their work. The difference between submitting the work and reading the book is that if you haven't read it, it couldn't have changed you at all. Universities and research centers that want to compete in the European space must not only have the equality plan signed; they must be able to demonstrate that their policies work, that the data improves, that culture changes. Not a document saved on the institutional website, but an organization that has changed from within. And this is not achieved by signing a paper. A paper does not make spring. But an institution that truly fulfills it, does.

This week marks four years since Russia's invasion of Ukraine; the Israeli-Palestinian conflict continues; the internal war in Myanmar has been ongoing since 2021, and so on with at least a dozen other conflicts. And amidst so much bitterness, a scientific article published this year in the International Political Science Review In which Giuditta Fontana, from the University of Birmingham, and colleagues from the same university and the University of Hamburg conclude that, when women participate in peace processes, the probability of the conflict reigniting is reduced by at least 11%, reaching up to 37% when the UN intervenes.

February 11th, the International Day of Women and Girls in Science, is approaching—a day to think critically, and also with hope. Not because women do science differently, but because even today they encounter obstacles more frequently than their male counterparts. The data from the report Women in Science in Numbers 2025 They help us understand where we are and, above all, where to go from here.

This December, the Bada Grant from the Barcelona College of Physicians has allowed me to look at healthcare from within an African country, without haste (pole pole(as they would say in Swahili). It hasn't just been a training stay. I would say I've entered an invisible network of doctors, nurses, managers, and researchers who not only heal, but also draw, with colored pencils, the map of the healthcare systems of the future. Frontline women who don't ask permission to lead, and women in open public health offices where decisions save lives before the ambulances even leave. Powerful, in capital letters, and often exhausted, silently. And perhaps that's why, reading the Women in Global Health report... The great resignation: why female healthcare professionals are leaving I choked on my coffee (by the way, Kenyan and delicious).

This week we commemorated November 25th, the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women. While the most explicit forms of male violence dominate the headlines, it is worth remembering that gender-based violence takes many forms, some more subtle but equally deplorable. Therefore, I want to mention the Manifesto of values by Women for Quantum (W4Q), which challenges us on how scientific and academic environments reproduce dynamics of exclusion and symbolic violence that render women invisible.

Imagine perfectly meticulous plans that draw a sustainable and equitable edifice, but which remain at the foundations and are never built. This has often been the case with equality policy: a magnificent drawing of a building that is never finished, especially in the scientific and academic fields. Now, as the European Commission launches the new Equality Strategy 2026-2030, we are at a decisive moment.

The 21st-century university resembles a puzzle where a key piece, gender equality, doesn't quite fit. This is demonstrated by the latest Vives Network report on the gender perspective in teaching, published this September. For those not familiar with this network, it's the association of universities in the Catalan language and culture regions. The report in question compiles data from 20 universities, and the authors, María José Rodríguez Jaume and Diana Gil González, as well as collaborator Julia Cimas Sánchez, are from the University of Alicante.

You know what worries me about the artificial intelligence revolution? That we're repeating the same old mistakes. And I say this while reading the results of a study showing how women adopt generative AI tools like ChatGPT, the most well-known, at a significantly slower rate than men.

Exactly seven days ago, the 23rd Medical Profession Conference was held at the Cerdà Museum in Puigcerdà as part of the Ramon Llull Summer University. The panelists were predominantly female physicians. In fact, in Catalonia, women are predominantly female in the medical profession, and among younger generations, the proportion is 70%. However, it wasn't until 2025 that a woman presided over one of the four Catalan medical associations for the first time. Specifically, this February 2025, Elvira Bisbe, an anesthesiologist at Hospital del Mar and until now vice president of the Barcelona Medical Association, marked a milestone by becoming the first female president of this association since its founding in 1894.

I just bought a recipe book. At the end, there are some blank pages for writing down your own recipes. I decided to write my own so I can cook up the UNESCO report for you. Women Lead for Learning (Women Leading Through Learning) published May 20.

I compulsively read an article in the magazine Science from last week, which arrived via email from across the Atlantic. As I read on, my eyes bulged, and by the time I finished, the pressure on my eyes had tears streaming down my cheeks. I wiped them away and wrote. I wanted to share it. And here I am.

Every three years since 2003, the report She Figures The European Commission challenges me with a question: Can Europe aspire to lead global innovation if it doesn't tap into all of its talent? The 2024 edition, published a few weeks ago, confirms that gender equality in research and innovation (R&I) is advancing in fits and starts: there is progress, yes, but the gaps are as wide as they are urgent. And the title of the report is already, in itself, a declaration of intent.She" is actually an acronym that originally stood for Statistics in Higher Education (higher education statistics) that has evolved to encompass the entire R&I ecosystem, whether academic, business, or government. And there's the play on words: She Figures It's not only translated as "her figures," but also as "she figures." That is, women participate, they contribute... or they should. But the reality remains harsher than the poetic meaning of the report's title.

March is coming to an end, a month increasingly marked by the 8th, International Women's Day. And it doesn't surprise me, because there's a clear need to demand more equality and justice. That's why I don't want to let March go by without talking about it, and doing so in conjunction with data, which is key both to understanding the world and making decisions. We talked about this at Open Data Day 2025, organized by the Barcelona Open Data Initiative, and focused on open data technology in support of women's rights. We talked about codes, numbers, words, algorithms, and web portals. But above all, we talked about power. Every bit, every statistic, every set of information is imprinted with a perspective, and that perspective determines what is visualized and what is left in the shadows, or even what is forgotten. If women don't participate in the creation, analysis, and application of this data, the digital revolution will transmit the very biases of inequality of our reality, current and past. I hope not of the future.

Medical research has long been a field with an androcentric vision. Melina Kibbe, dean of the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Virginia in the US, became aware of this reality when a colleague asked her: "What about females?" Until then, in her studies on cardiovascular diseases, Kibbe had used male rats without question. Her experience is not unique. Despite advances in awareness of the need to include females in research (mandatory in the US since 2016), inequality persists, with consequences for the health of millions of women.