Science and Universities

Barcelona City Council has signed an agreement to finance the “Women leaders in science and technology” project of the Barcelona Institute of Science and Technology (BIST). With a monetary contribution of 200,000 euros, the City Council and BIST will implement specific measures to support postdoctoral researchers and junior group leaders, and to train children and young people in science and technology.

Barcelona City Council’s participation in the project will provide funding and support for programmes to help the city’s scientific community grow. The aim of this initiative is to promote the active presence of women in the fields of science and research leadership and equity in the scientific world. According to various studies, almost half of all PhD graduates are women, but they represent only 24% of the heads of academic institutions. In science and technology-related disciplines, the proportion of women is even lower.

In February 2022, the City Council promoted the study Women and Science in Barcelona, a qualitative analysis of the factors that affect the careers of female researchers in the city, which already pointed out as conclusions and recommendations that it was necessary to undertake measures to raise awareness in the scientific community about the daily practices and stereotypes that are contributing to maintaining the inequalities suffered by female researchers; to commit to visibility measures that give recognition and prestige to these more feminised areas of knowledge and to strengthen actions to make female scientists more visible.

Now, with the agreement signed by the City Council and BIST, the funding and support for programmes will begin such as To the Mothers of Science, which provides financial support and professional advice to women scientists to make it easier for them to keep up with research, among many other initiatives. In addition, it will also reach the BIST Ignite programme to promote multidisciplinary research and contribute to the consolidation of the scientific cooperation community.

In this case, two collaborative, multidisciplinary and innovative scientific projects co-led by women will be promoted: Terafox, which seeks a new and more efficient method to modulate matter with light, and Explode-TNBC, focused on developing a targeted therapy against breast cancers. 

This agreement will also provide institutional support for actions to bring female researchers closer to secondary schools, promote the link between students in 2nd and 3rd ESO and research through the iScience programme, and reinforce the #100tifiques programme aimed at students in 6th year of primary and 1st year of ESO. Actions will also be promoted to train researchers in science education, and to articulate a programme of visits with international references in this field.