The UAB thanks Margot Pujal for her "commitment to gender equality and women's rights"

Tribute was paid to Margot Pujal in this nineteenth edition of the institutional celebration of 8 March, in which she evoked the origins of her interest in "learning about the psychic mechanisms of power", conditioned by belonging to a generation marked by the events of the Spanish Civil War and post-war period and by having had to "survive in a deeply patriarchal and precarious labour market". She then recounted her academic career at the UAB since she joined the Department of Social Psychology in 1984, when she began her collaboration with Professor Tomás Ibáñez.

According to Pujal, her main line of research has focused on two aspects: "the processes of binary subjectivation related to the psychosocial production of self-centered and individualistic identities, and the relationship between gender and health based on the binary gender as a factor of unequal risk for psychological suffering and health". She expressed her gratitude to the Department of Social Psychology of the UAB, to the research groups Des-Subjectant and LIS, to the Observatory for Equality and to all the students and collaborators in general who "have made possible" her journey. And she has claimed that "it is up to us to continue working so that the involutive perception, growing today, that 'feminism has gone too far' becomes a real reason to celebrate equality, diversity and epistemic justice".

In his speech, Rector Lafuente reaffirmed the University's "firm commitment to promote policies of equality and inclusion" and "move towards a feminist university" with "the involvement and effort" of the entire university community. As she explained, "the UAB is a pioneering university and a reference in the defense of women's rights and gender equality," recalling the creation of the Observatory for Equality in 2005, the first in higher education institutions throughout Spain, and the implementation of action plans for equality between women and men in 2006.

Rector Lafuente took the opportunity to thank the work carried out by the Observatory for Equality and recalled that "this year marks the end of the implementation of the fourth action plan for gender equality at the UAB and the process of drawing up the fifth plan has already begun". In this sense, Maria Prats, director of the Observatory for Equality of the UAB, detailed some of the main results obtained in the diagnosis carried out for the creation of this fifth action plan for gender equality. The secretary general of the UAB, Esther Zapater, explained that, since 2023, a working group is designing a first equality plan in labour matters that will be part of the fifth gender equality plan of the University. Zapater summarised the actions carried out by the Observatory for Equality and other entities such as the Psychogender Unit in terms of awareness and attention to the university community, and expressed her gratitude to all the people and agents involved in the institution's equality policies: "without you," she said, "all this work would be impossible".