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.

In early July, the French courts acquitted two women who had claimed on social media that Brigitte Macron, the wife of the President of the French Republic, is transgender. In their comments, they listed the multiple surgeries she had allegedly undergone and claimed that she was not the biological mother of their children. A court ordered them to pay eight thousand euros to the first lady in September 2024, but they were acquitted ten months later, a decision that the Macrons appealed to the French Court of Cassation. Furthermore, her lawyer recently explained that Brigitte is determined to provide scientific and photographic evidence in court to "prove" that she is a woman, after the influencer ultra Candace Owens has dedicated several podcasts and a book to denying it.

That when the professor addresses the student, they should use the name they prefer and respect the gender with which they identify. This objective, which at first glance might seem easy, until a few years ago involved a high level of bureaucracy for university students who, for whatever reason, do not identify with the information reflected in their official documents such as their ID or passport. However, public universities are now making it increasingly easier to make these changes. However, these modifications will only be valid in the strictly university setting and will not be reflected in official degrees.

More than 25% of girls – one in four – of Generation Z [born between 1997 and 2012] identify as non-heterosexual. This percentage is double the way their older sisters, the millennials, identify, and also distances themselves from their male peers, who show a more normative sexual orientation. This data is extracted from research by Maria Rodó-Zárate, a researcher at the Pompeu Fabra University of Barcelona (UPF), and Joel Cantó Roche, a doctoral student at the Canadian University of Toronto. Based on two official surveys of 4,000 young Catalan women of both generations, they analyzed how between 2017 and 2018, "more and more young people are opting for less rigid identifications, and moving away from fixed labels such as... gay either lesbian", the authors of the study point out, while adopting "more open positions, such as bisexuality or other forms of sexual diversity".

"I accepted myself", "Everything fit", "I discovered myself for the first time": LGTBIAQ+ people have very different stories, but most of them agree that their lives changed the day they met someone they could identify with. They remember it as a "liberating", happy moment; which at the same time contrasts with the disapproving looks, insults and aggressions that many of them also report having suffered for not fitting in with the norm. In this report we make visible some of their lives at the moment of expansion of the collective.

Male and female. Masculine and feminine. This binary classification of the world leaves out many people who do not identify with it. They are the people with other gender identities and sexual orientations represented by the acronym LGTBI+. The new generations claim this diversity and push society to look beyond genitalia.

Thirty years is what it would take at the current rate to eliminate the wage gap between men and women. The conclusion comes from a study by Comisiones Obreras presented last summer, which uses 2018 data from INE and Idescat. Another figure, in this case from Eurostat, confirms wage discrimination between genders: women workers earn 14.8% less per hour than men who do the same job in the European Union. And yet a third piece of information now from the Bank of Spain: when they have a child, men keep their salaries, while women's salaries go down by 11% that same year and by 28% over the course of a decade. In Catalonia, moreover, women earn 22.2% less on average than men