Good afternoon.
(Applause)
If I ask you what they have in common all these things behind me:
Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPS, e-book, dishwasher,
the folding umbrella, Kevlar, what do they have in common?
Apparently nothing between them. Well, yes, we can have it at home.
Historically, and I have left the question in suspension expressly,
I have not forgotten
Historically women have been very unlikely, let’s say so,
throughout history.
Behind me I have the name of three referring women: the above Maria the Prophetess
or Maria la Jueva, who was the assistant of an alchemist of the time,
let’s say Manolo,
and Maria was the one who made the schemes of separations, distillation …
And in a moment he proposed a protocol for making an isothermal bath
which is what we now know as a bath maria for her head
He said that was not important, if we did not know it as a Manolo bathroom.
(Applause)
The middle one is Hypatia of Alexandria, the first female mathematician and astronomer
of history.
If you know the movie Ágora you know who I am talking about and who has not seen it
sorry because I’ll do “spoiler”: it ends very badly.
The crime of the Hypatia was not to be sage, but to say the world: “I know!”
If he had been silent, he would have gone in a different way.
That is why Hildegarda de Bingen, who is the last lady of the image,
He chose to protect himself and protect his wisdom behind the walls of a convent.
We will find women, historically, like Hildegarda,
well-known with Leonarda Da Vinci of the time: doctor, wise, curator,
musical composer … wise women behind the walls of a convent
Because the alternative was either the convent or the bonfire, you can imagine it.
A measure of a person’s visibility is how many appointments he has on Google.
We’re going to see.
If we look for these three people how many entries Google has
We found 29,000, 69,000, 200,000, that is, among the three referring women
They hardly reach the quarter of a million tickets.
It’s a lot? Is it little Compare
If I look for the name of three referent men like Einstein, Da Vinci,
or a neighbor from Reus that was called Gaudí
You will have Google entries for hundreds of millions.
These are orders of magnitude.
It is not double or triple, it is order of magnitude.
This is a measure of the little or no visibility women have had
of science or technology, that have been dedicated to things that did not touch,
how are you here?
All these women have in common that they discovered or invented something
We use it daily but we do not know what they did.
Josephine Cochrane invented the dishwasher, not for washing dishes
but to ensure hygiene in the health field.
Mary Anderson invented the windshield wipers.
The Beulah Louise Henry, known as Mrs. Edison, with more than 70 patents,
he invented the linotype, precursor of the photocopier
and the folding umbrella.
Clearly inventions of feminine use.
The Hedy Lamarr, known for her role as an actress,
one of the most beautiful actresses that have been there,
It is the woman who invented Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and GPS. All.
Without the inventions of the Hedy I could not hunt Pokémons.
What would it be like in my life?
His name, like that of previous women, does not appear in any textbook, anywhere.
Stephanie Kwolek is a bloody case of invisibility.
Stephanie was a chemist, she worked for Dupont, and invented
a highly wear-resistant polymer that is called Kevlar, and which is the base
of anti-particle jackets or safety material.
Clearly this invention deserved a Nobel and they denied him.
With 40 years he was denied a Nobel who deserved all lights.
She was vindicating all her life that she deserved her.
When he was 80 years old he was told: “We will give you but shared, exaequo.”
How many women, except the Nobel Peace women, have Nobel laureates alone?
Perhaps with the fingers of one hand you will have enough.
Maybe you will use one of the other hand, but to count.
One way to reduce visibility to the goals achieved by a woman
It is reducing its value, and giving a Nobel Exaequo is one of the ways.
Stephanie refused this Nobel. Good for her
The visibility of these women is counted in hundreds of thousands, enough.
None of them reach one million.
Yes, Mary Anderson, there are hundreds of millions, but it’s because they say
Mary Anderson is like saying Miquel Pérez.
When you separate Mary Anderson and wipers
there are hundreds of thousands.
They are very little visible.
This in the case of inventions, but when a woman wanted to have
academic knowledge, what happened?
The first universities arrive in Europe in the 18th century and in Spain in the eighteenth century,
In Catalonia we will have to wait until the eighteenth century to have the University of Cervera.
If we see the image of the group that studies, identify the student clearly
With the iPad of the time in his hands, behind him the helper helped her
to load things, the teacher in front of and behind the lady, who was in charge
That the student was nourished, clean and polished, but in the picture it is clearly seen,
He is the only one who is listening to the teacher.
We will find women at the University at this time only as curators
of the students
When will we find a woman linked to the University?
The first one we find collected as a woman with studies is Juliana Morell.
She is one of the two women in the paraninfo of the University of Barcelona
which is a room full of arches with names of people, more than 150,
and two women only: one Juliana Morell.
She was a wise girl who spoke with three languages at the age of 7 and parents thought
and the society that perhaps deserved to go to the University.
At that time in Catalonia there were no universities and in Spain they said no.
He had to go to Lyon to study.
He will be the first university woman but he had to study in France.
We will find a woman of science in the University of Barcelona, in the s. XIX,
Maria Elena Maseras.
He arrived dressed as a man, just like years ago Concepción Arenal had come
He dressed as a man to go to university classes.
She began to study medicine and dressed as a man to leave her
to enter the classrooms.
A year later Dolors Aleu arrives but she does not want to go dressed as a man,
and his father pays him a bodyguard.
When Dolores arrives with the bodyguard, Maria Elena says: “We share it!”
“And I will be able to remove these suits from man”
A little later Martina Castells will come and share classrooms,
tables and bodyguards. How pretty!
(Laughter)
At this time we will have three women of science at the university
And the reaction arrives that is a Royal Order of 1882
which explicitly prohibits the access of women to university.
The end. Is over.
That yes, if anyone was studying already, it could end. We breathe
With three women who had been able to get to where they were, they had retained
graduation, there was some social movement,
Families who said that their daughters also deserved to study,
and there was a new Royal Decree in 1888 regulating access for women
to the University.
Regular means that they should explicitly request permission to enter
and explaining the reasons.
With this filter, in the whole of the 19th century, women do not reach a dozen
that they studied
All women of science, pharmacy and medicine.
Clearly at the service of society.
Normality reaches 1910, with a Royal Decree that finally allows
women’s access to university.
Top 50 or 100 years after prestigious universities
But surprisingly long before other European universities such as Cambridge.
In 1933 we find the first woman who owns a chair at the university:
Margarita Comas, but yes, they said: “Maybe you should spend a lot.”
And he decided to be single. Let’s leave it here.
In the 60’s or 70’s, we will find normality at university,
in the sense of significant amounts of women when we get the children
of the baby boom in the university, being the step in which this one stops being
an elitist space to be a university of masses so that the workers understand
as an added value for your children and their daughters
university education
We are therefore the first university generations
and how was it for the engineers?
The first female engineer was Pilar Careaga, a girl from Bilbao
That he is going to study in Madrid and when the race finishes he has a last one
exam to do: check for train driving.
They did it to Madrid.
She goes up there and says: “Hello, I’m Pilar. What’s my train?”
And the train company says to him that they do not leave a train to him, to the girl this,
that will break it down.
He was two years fighting to be able to examine himself as a train and finish the race
and when he got it he became the first female engineer of Spain
and the first female driver of trains.
When years later they asked him what it was, she said: “I, train driver!”
We will find in Catalonia a first engineer with the name of Isabel de Portugal Trabal
and shortly thereafter Laura Tremosa, who is now the oldest living engineer.
Laura lived with her normal career despite having it
many pitfalls to be able to exercise.
And he left us this wonderful phrase:
Science is masculine but technology as a solution to problems is feminine.
A phrase that I like a lot.
So, at 70 we will have a significant but distributed percentage of women
irregularly
Where were women going? To studies that were socially accepted.
Teachers and nurses.
Let’s make a record How many masters do we remember from our childhood who were single?
Many
There was a saying in Castile that said:
A woman who knows Latin, has no husband or has a good end.
My grandfather also told me:
“Nuri, you do not study much to see if no one is going to love you.”
What will we do?
This means that there were studies or professions that were not so well accepted
or so well recognized.
In the 80s we will have 44% of women in the university but distributed
irregularly
The technical studies, very little thing.
In the 90s, more than 50% of the university population will be women and they are majority
in many of the studies but not in engineering or ICT studies,
And a fact that surprised me is that in private universities
women are also minorities.
I leave the reading for anyone who wants to do it.
This scheme that you have behind me is not an evolution of anything.
It is the departments map of my university.
Each bar represents a department, the red are men, the blue ones are women.
This is my job. I work here.
The only one that reaches 50% is optical. All the others nothing
You can see in which areas we have more women, 30%,
or we have fewer women, 5%.
This has led us to think what we have to do.
Activities to capture female talent, such as mentoring campaigns, to promote
the empowerment of the girls that we have or specific collections
As in the field of computing, when he changed his degree
In computer engineering, the proportion of women dropped, from one year to the next
from 40% to 20%.
Conclusion: Engineering is scared to women.
These are the notices that we introduce, to the Polytechnic,
in addition to the contents, and I do not see any of these competencies
be exclusive of men and women.
So, at what moment do we curb women to study engineering?
I do not understand, why do not we have more girls?
Why is there a headline in La Vanguardia: “Woman and university”
I do not get it.
But we needed this exercise to see how it had gone to previous women
to us to be able to build positive actions to boost female talent.
It is unfortunate that I am the holder only because of being a metallurgist.
He makes them funny: “Oh, a metallurgical woman!”
We still have a lot to do to remove headlines like this one
that there is one in every 10 academics who are women.
We have to make our dream our future,
us and the generations that we have behind us.
[The future is ours!]
This wonderful phrase that I always like to use in any of the three
Languages, it has no gender difference.
Now I ask you, what did all this have in common?
They had in common that behind was a woman who was invisible.
The castellers, who do not have to explain what they are, have come out this morning
as a good example of teamwork.
Ari, that girl who was the queen of the world that was above all.
It is the example that I put to my students to ask them to work
in hybrid equipment.
I do not like to separate male talents of feminine talent,
because when they work together it’s when they get to the top of everything.
Did you know that since there are women in the castellers teams they have been able to make 10 floors?
(Applause)
What he wanted to say is that if we get to work together, it’s when we get to the top.
Finally, I’d like to leave a phrase:
When a little boy says he wants to be an engineer, people say “very well!”,
When a girl says she wants to be an engineer they ask: “and that, where did you get it from?”
And the girl must give explanations.
This is what many times a baby brakes because she says:
“If I have to explain so many times when my brother does not, maybe that’s it
I’m doing it wrong. “
And suddenly he says: “I wanted to be a nurse, I was wrong.”
And people say: “Oh, what a hell!”
Therefore, it is in our hands to change these data
and that I do not have to come here to chat on Saturday afternoon.
(Applause)
What can we all do to change this and to encourage it?
To enhance this feminine talent, because together with the masculine
get us right up?
Well, to encourage the girls, the best we can do
It’s not to discourage it.
Thank you so much!
(Applause)
”
Be First to Comment