It’s 9am on Friday 7 March and rain is threatening. In the auditorium, everything is ready for the round table to celebrate International Women’s Day. After an 11 February focused on inspiring primary school children, this 8M the lucky ones are students between 16 and 18 years old from 5 schools in different parts of Barcelona. Surely, many of them have already thought about what they want to ‘be when they grow up’. However, in the world of science, there are many jobs that go unnoticed. With this round table, the PRBB wants to show that, if you study science, you don’t necessarily have to work as a teacher or researcher. This is the second year this round table has been held and last year it was very successful. We hope it will be a success once more.
By 9:15am, groups of students and teachers have been gathering in the courtyard. They don’t seem very anxious, but when they are told they can go up to the auditorium, they all go in droves. When I enter the auditorium after telling the latecomers which way to go, it is packed to capacity. Only the last three or four rows are empty. As they sit down, a looped video of life at the PRBB is playing. I grab my camera and start documenting.
Gemma Perelló, assistant manager of the Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal) and member of both the ISGlobal’s and the PRBB’s Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) committees, moderates the round table. She says that last weekend, a friend of her fifteen-year-old son told her that it was becoming ‘very tiresome to talk so much about female referents’. However, she says that these references must continue to be shown because, although women do make up 50% of students, doctoral students and postdocs, the proportion starts to fall when one moves up the academic career ladder. This is known as the scissors effect.
Gemma gives the floor to the first speaker, Joana Porcel, research manager also at ISGlobal. Joana says that as a little girl she was always looking for bugs in the park to look at them through her father’s microscope. Her idea was to go into biology, but physics and chemistry made her give up. So she decided to become a neuropsychologist until she ‘moved to the dark side’: research management. Her day-to-day life is fast-paced, varied, always full of meetings.
Next up is Marta Román, a biostatistician at the Hospital del Mar Research Institute. Her dream was not science, but music. She started working at the hospital as a way to pay for her music career. However, she saw that science was also exciting. She emphasises that to balance the day to day, one has to do it by exploring what one likes. She does this by playing in her band The Blaxound and doing mountain sports. Marta stresses that achieving equality is not just a women’s issue, but everyone’s.
Avencia Sánchez-Mejías comes to represent a woman in a management position in a company. She is the co-founder and CEO of Integra Therapeutics. In 2022, she founded the company with Marc Güell (Universitat Pompeu Fabra) to launch FiCAT, a device that had been developed in his group. On the scissors effect, she mentions that in her company there is parity, except in the management committee, where she is the only woman out of the 6 positions. She mentions something that makes a lot of sense to me and that I had not realised before. She says that, in order to balance her work, family and personal life, the first thing she does is to look after herself. If she is not well, she can’t take care of anything else.
Avencia passes the floor to Elena Bosch Fusté, researcher at the Institute for Evolutionary Biology (IBE: CSIC-UPF) and recently appointed Professor at the Department of Medicine and Life Sciences of the Universitat Pompeu Fabra (MELIS-UPF). As she says, she learned science at home. Her mother was a microbiologist and her father a chemist. Her aunt, Helena Fusté, was president of Greenpeace and her grandfather, Miquel Fusté i Ara, an anthropologist. Elena opted for biology. Now, she combines three facets in her daily life: teaching, research and management. This last one is the one she enjoys the least. She loves the other two, however, and that is why she tells us about her ‘academic’ children, the doctoral students in her care. She has had eight who have already finished and is currently managing three more.
Sharing Elena’s surname, the next to speak is Berta Fusté Pérez, head of the genomics unit at the Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG). When she was a child, she doubted whether to devote herself to science or to art. Although she is not a professional, she is still linked to art and hopes to be able to devote more time to it in the future. Her day-to-day work is a hive of activity to keep the unit running at full capacity. She has 15 people in charge, and together they manage around 500 projects each year and analyse more than 25,000 samples. She stresses that, to be efficient, you need to be focused on what you are doing at all times.
Finally, it is Heura Cardona‘s turn. A laboratory manager at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory – Barcelona (EMBL – Barcelona), when she was a child, she wanted to be a veterinarian or an archaeologist because of the film Jurassic Park, among other reasons. She studied biology after having to give up marine biology due to distance, as it was only available in Madrid and Andalusia. The group she works in does mainly computational research. She treats the samples and does the experiments in the lab. The data she obtains is passed on to the rest of the group, who process it by computer. In her case, her future is uncertain, as her contract runs out in a few months and she cannot renew it. She ended her talk with a reflection from Tayla Dayton, a group leader at EMBL Barcelona: ‘When you find it hard to do something, it’s a sign that you are learning’.
It is interesting that all the speakers have highlighted some of the same things. Most of them have moved around a lot during their careers. Some have spent little time abroad; others their entire doctorate. They also agree that it is necessary to have activities and hobbies outside work. All of them do sport or disconnect by going out of the city. And they all have a support network, either in their family or in their group of friends.
A shy but dynamic audience
As usual, at the end of the presentations, no one raises their hand to ask questions. There is a lot of information to process and little time. Luckily, Joana decides to ask the audience several questions herself: ‘Raise your hand if you have scientific models around you. How many of you know what you want to do when you finish high school? Do any of you want to be a researcher?’ This breaks the ice and there is more movement in the auditorium.
In the front row, a girl answers the question about scientific models. She says that her mother has gone back to university. The girl has two younger siblings and sees how her mother strugles juggling everything. However, she also says that she has never seen her so happy.
Joana Porcel asks the public for their participation 
Avencia Sánchez-Mejías answers one of the questions 
The speakers laugh while Gemma Perelló leads to a question
The speakers also reply to the question of the models: many of them had a teacher or scientist as a point of reference, but in general there were few. Marta points out that in her case there were no known trans women that could be a model for her, and that she is pleased to see that there are more and more nowadays. That is not the case, she says, for trans men, of which there aren’t many visible as references.
Finally, some questions are asked from the audience. One person asks if the speakers had experienced any sexist attitudes. More than one case comes up. Elena heard a male researcher say ‘you shut up, baby’ to another female researcher. This causes a stir in the audience. Heura points out that because women are more cautious, they are less listened to. She has seen how the same idea proposed by a woman is not accepted because it is presented as a possibility: ‘what if we do this or that?’ However, when the same idea is repeated by a man in a more categorical way, it is accepted. Now, when she sees these attitudes, she tries to counteract them.
The round table ends with a final question from Gemma to the speakers: ‘Would you go down the same path again?’. Opinions vary. Many would, although others, perhaps, would have taken alternative options. It is 11:30am. A round of applause for all, and the schools are leaving, again in droves. Only a group stays behind to have their photo taken with the speakers. Outside, it is now raining.
