Equity4es is an initiative born in the spring of 2021 within the Earth Sciences Department. It's now supported directly by the BSC Equity officer, Maria Gracia Puga Villanueva within the Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Equity, Diversity and Inclusion program .

You can find more information on the Equity4ES BSC page.

Everyone is welcome to join. Meetings are held every third Friday of the month at 3 PM. You can find information in the Department calendar.

To subscribe, you can send an email to equity4es@bsc.es . There is also a slack channel #equity4es , you can find the link to the zoom meeting and the access to the common drive in the description of the channel.

And check past gazettes and debates of the month.

• awareness raising
• Guidelines on how to write a job offer
• Work-life balance
• Gather anonymous experiences

It started when Bianca Mezzina sent an email to the department on the occasion of International Day of Women and Girls in Science (11/02/2021), mentioning the UN statistics: “less than 30% of researchers worldwide are women” and questioning the situation in the department.

As part of the actions that we wanted to set up within the framework of the WG “Awareness raising”, some of us take care to write a newsletter shared to the whole department, and that we call Gazette.

The idea is to cover the latest debates on gender equality:

We bring to the table arguments in favour and against some policies and initiatives that are being proposed around the world to address the gender equality gap in the workplace, and also in the public sphere.

Gender Equity is a sensitive and relevant challenge that has an impact on all of us. Yet, most of us have never received appropriate training and our insights on the topic are based either on personal beliefs/experiences, causal conversations or other informal opportunities. One of the most important tasks that we are carrying on in the Equality group is to gather a body of trusted knowledge that help us understand the causes and impacts of inequalities. We think that this knowledge is key to feeding better-informed debates and tackling Gender Equity issues at both personal and institutional levels.

With this regular communication, we seek to share with you some peer-reviewed data and work done on different aspects of Gender Equity. Our aims are:

• 1. to raise awareness on topics that may impact us now or in the future,
• 2. to give access to useful resources that may help inform different positions on selected topics, and
• 3. to share with you what we have been learning so far.

Our first action was to make our own inventory, by sending a survey to the department and by presenting the results of our different working groups at the General department meeting on May 27, 2021. The presentation can be downloaded here.

We presented the current organisation of the group and our on-going actions during the department gathering event which took place at the Fabra Observatori on November 23, 2021. The presentation can be found here.

With people of the other BSC departments, Sara O. participated in the presentation at the BSC annual meeting on December 17, 2021. The presentation can be found on this website (scroll down, after the bias test).

We did a presentation of the Equity4es initiative mainly intended for newcomers, although a general reminder is always welcome, at the department meeting on April 17, 2023. The presentation is here .

We presented the Equity4es initiative for the first time outside of BSC, in a conference held in Tarragona in June 2023, named Excluded spaces: Gender, identity, and inequalities. Our presentation is here.

In March 2024, some people of Equity4es involved in the EC-Earth consortium presented a talk introducing the topic, accompanied by a questionnaire which those attending the General Assembly were able to answer live. The presentation is here and we also did a poster , so that people could get together to discuss the subject and get references.

You can find the list of seminars that we organized in this webpage.

This page gathers different publications and documents that we strongly recommend reading.