Margot Pujal i Llombart: "To displace the binary health paradigm, a psychology for equality and diversity is being built and recovered"
This year, the XIX Institutional Conference in commemoration of the International Women’s Day has had the presentation of the main results of the diagnosis for the elaboration of the V Plan of Action for Gender Equality, a video and speech by Margot Pujal i Llombart and a performance by the UAB choir.
29/02/2024
Today, March 6th, 2024, at 12pm, the conference room of the Rectorate opened its doors to commemorate International Women’s Day. The general secretary, Esther Zapater, commenced with a short speech about gender inequalities in science and knowledge. According to her words: “the representation of women gets lower along the academic career in the taller scales of acknowledgement. Despite women represent a 59% of the people who nowadays get graduated in Catalan universities, their presence is carefully reduced in the presidency of research projects”.
The general secretary has also highlighted the core points in which the Observatory has worked over last year. During 2023, the work group of the negotiating commission has continued the elaboration of the 1st Action Plan for gender equality in work-related matters. As the diagnosis has already ended, nowadays, it is dedicated to designing the measures that will be included. Concurrently, it has also kept monitoring the 4th Action Plan for Gender Equality. Other important tasks have been the promotion of sensibilization campaigns, formative actions and the application of the protocol against harassment.
Zapater gave the floor to the director of the Observatory for Equality, Maria Prats, to present the main results of the diagnosis for the elaboration of the V Action Plan for Gender Equality. In this way, Prats has provided a detailed vision of gender inequalities in UAB working staff. In the case of teaching and research staff (PDI), there are 4% more men than women. In the case of teaching and research staff, temporary hiring predominates (70.6%) of adjunct teaching staff (37.2%) with part-time working days (52%).
In academy, female underrepresentation is palpable. The diagnosis reveals a scissor graph, in which women predominate at the beginning of the research career and are in a minority in the highest positions. In fact, only 30% of the teaching staff at the UAB are women. This vertical segregation is also present in PTGAS. Although the administrative workforce is 63.3% female, women are underrepresented in senior positions. In the case of the governing team or trade unions, the figures are more equal. Despite this, a retrospective look shows that the participation of women in the UAB continues to grow since the first Action Plan for Equality in 2006.
In the case of UAB students, more women study bachelor’s, master’s or doctoral degrees; since they represent more than 60% of the total number of people enrolled, particularly in the faculties of Education, Psychology and Medicine. In contrast, despite efforts to include more women in STEM, men are more present in the School of Engineering, the Faculty of Science and the Faculty of Economics and Bussiness.
Gender-based and LGBTI-phobic violence has been a priority for the equality unit. As Maria Prats, director of the Observatory, argued, "the number of cases we attend has increased, because awareness campaigns have been successful, and people trust us when they find themselves in this situation". In the last eight years, they have accompanied 142 cases, of which more than half have been since 2020. According to the figures provided, 91.5% of these situations are suffered by women, 83.1% of whom were students. Prats focused on the most recurrent situations of harassment at the UAB: intimate partner violence (33.1%), sexual harassment (23.2%) and sexual assault or rape (13.4%). To deal with this, the Observatory has several mechanisms, such as the harassment protocol or psychological care. This year, it has also promoted the workspace of masculinities, to include men in the UAB's commitment to eradicate gender-based and LGBTI-phobic violence.
The Observatory also wanted to emphasize the opinions of the UAB community about its resources, the reconciliation of work and family life and the gender perspective in the spaces of the university. According to the survey it has carried out, the most unknown equality policies are the name-change protocol and psychological assistance to victims of gender-based or LGBTI-phobic violence. On the other hand, in this survey, 61.5% of people have stated that they have work-life balance needs. In terms of spaces, 42% considered that there are no toilet options for the non-binary gender. In addition, 43% asked for more hygienic material in the toilets, as well as including a sink inside the individual toilets for cleaning these products. In the case of breastfeeding, two thirds of the people surveyed answered that they need a space in their workplace that is adapted for this activity.
After the presentation of the diagnosis data, Dr. Patricia Amigot Leache, from the Public University of Navarra, gave a speech to pay tribute to Dr. Margot Pujal i Llombart, her thesis supervisor and colleague. Amigot wanted to highlight Pujal's contributions from feminist and critical perspectives. She also emphasized that she has been a pioneer in the development of a theory and analysis that incorporates emotion, desire and embodiment. In this way, Pujal has explored the experiences of pain and discomfort linked to gender conditioning factors.
Then, a video tribute was projected in which important people of Pujal's career shared experiences and anecdotes about her. Margot Pujal i Llombart is a tenured lecturer in the Department of Social Psychology and coordinates the DES-Subjectant.GESPI research group. In 2014, she promoted the Joan Rivière Centre in the Faculty of Psychology dedicated to training, research and advice on gender perspective in the field of psychology. From 2017 to 2023, she has also been responsible for equality policies in the faculty where she works, collaborating with the Observatory.
Once the rector presented her with the recognition award, Pujal made a brief speech in which she went through her forty years in research, her origins, her references and the lines of research she has followed. Epistemologists such as Evelyn Fox Keller or Donna Haraway have marked her career with the poststructuralist feminist thought. As Pujal said, she has focused on "building an analytical perspective, which relates gender studies, psychology and health sciences, in order to deepen and refine inequalities in mental health". In fact, "in women we find anxiety, autolytic attempts, problems with the body or substance use and invisible addictions, which originate in discrimination and violence based on gender", according to Pujal. "To displace this paradigm of binary health, a psychology for equality and diversity is being built, and at the same time recovering from oblivion," says Pujal. All this work has been within the framework of the research group DES-Subjectant-GESPI but also in collaboration with the group LIS-Social and gender studies on corporality.
To close the XIX Conference commemorating 8M, the UAB chamber choir gave a brief performance and the rector, Javier Lafuente, shared a few words. Lafuente: "Thanks to the individual and collective commitment of our community, the UAB is a pioneering university and a reference in the defense of women's rights and gender equality".