The UOC celebrates 8 March with a virtual escape room

Another 8 March, International Women's Day, is approaching, this one in the midst of a pandemic that has aggravated inequality even further. The arrival of remote working has added another layer to the domestic and family responsibilities that habitually fall on women. The UOC has decided to celebrate 8 March by developing a virtual escape room about gender inequality in universities and the academic world. This initiative is open to everyone, including people with no links to the UOC: just form a team of three and work together to solve puzzles related to the inequalities between men and women. 

The escape room is the most recent of the UOC's activities to promote gender equality. The institution has been organizing initiatives for over a decade to raise awareness and bring about real change. In the words of the Vice President for Globalization and Cooperation and president of the Equality Unit, Pastora Martínez Samper, "the UOC must act as a key agent in a society where structural inequalities exist, accepting responsibility for taking steps to reduce them and playing its part in helping to build fairer communities".

The initiative for this year's IWD involves a virtual escape room called Mission Talutiga, designed to raise awareness of gender inequality through an online game set in outer space. Martínez Samper said: "The added value of this initiative is that it combines a fun online activity with an open invitation, not only to members of our university community, but to anyone who wants to play. We believe this game will appeal to a very wide audience".

Solving the riddles set in the escape room will allow the UOC21X spaceship to travel towards an unknown planet, testing the ingenuity and awareness of the crew. The game will go live on 8 March from 8 am to 10 pm in every time zone, and will be available in Catalan and Spanish, to allow everyone to play. 

The challenge of reaching the unknown planet can only be overcome through cooperation, promoting the idea of moving forward together. Each riddle introduces ideas such as women's invisibility, the assumption of roles according to gender, the challenging of opinions based on who expresses them, or the use of tools such as equality plans to help transform society. The great surprise for players will be an encounter with Vicky Peña. The famous actress will perform the role of a retired scientist who will reveal to players the everyday occurrences that lead to gender inequality.

Daniel Aranda from the Faculty of Information and Communication Sciences is one of the experts who took part in the development of the escape room. "Computer games are learning machines that set challenges and can help improve concentration and awaken an interest in making new discoveries and improving our skills through the world of gaming," he argued. "We also know that computer games are especially good at helping people to construct meanings through experiences: they favour a form of learning that draws the player in to try and solve a problem, work on it, and, in the end, achieve an important goal," he added. In this case, this is "a significant learning experience based on raising awareness about gender equality," explained Aranda, who is also a member of the Learning, Media and Entertainment Research Group (GAME).

The pandemic has aggravated gender inequalities

This year's IWD is being celebrated under the shadow of the COVID-19 epidemic. "The crisis generated by the pandemic has an unequal impact on women, and universities are not excluded from this," said Vice President Pastora Martínez. 

The crisis is affecting everyone in the academic community, but especially women, whether teachers, researchers, administrative and service staff or students. "We still take on a disproportionate amount of domestic and caring tasks in line with gender roles," argued the coordinator of the UOC's Equality Unit, Maria Olivella. 

A survey of how people use their time during the 2020 lockdown carried out by the CEO found that 64.2% of the people who stated they were responsible for overseeing children's schoolwork were women, and 35.4% were men. This unequal distribution of responsibilities also has a direct impact in the academic sphere, with women's teaching and research work suffering more than that of men. This is reflected in an article in the PNAS, which also warns that the pandemic is amplifying the barriers to women's career advancement and growth.

Working towards equality for over a decade

The UOC has been working to raise awareness of gender inequalities for more than ten years through its Equality Unit and policies on gender issues within the institution. Exactly a year ago, shortly after the state of emergency and lockdown were announced, the University rolled out its 4th Gender Equality Plan. "This allowed us to build a gender perspective into our management of the crisis as an institution, monitoring to ensure equality criteria were built into the measures taken," explained Vice President Martínez.

One outcome of this work was the preparation of a guide to remote working and work-life balance for men and women, in which the UOC participated as a member of the Network of Gender Equality Units for University Excellence (RUIGEU), which led the initiative. The publication, aimed at universities, offers recommendations and measures for preventing inequalities and gender asymmetries linked to remote working, which may be made worse by the pandemic. 

Work also advanced in 2020 on incorporating a gender perspective in teaching. It was agreed, for the first time, to incorporate the cross-disciplinary skill of global ethical commitment, which includes a gender perspective, in all official degree and master's courses. This has been built into all new courses planned for the 2021/2022 academic year and the majority of existing courses. It will be added progressively to the remaining courses over the next two academic years.

To help teaching staff implement this new skill, a kit was designed containing tools and resources to provide guidance on course design and teaching with a gender perspective. The support provided also included two rounds of specific training for UOC teaching staff on how to incorporate this SDG cross-disciplinary skill, gender awareness and global ethical commitment into their courses. One hundred members of the teaching staff have now completed this training.

Meanwhile, in September the Vives University Network published the second part of the collection of guides to university teaching with a gender perspective. Maria Olivella, the coordinator of the UOC's Equality Unit, contributed to the development of these guides. This innovative teaching initiative, the first of its kind in Europe, currently comprises 17 guides to introducing gender awareness in 17 different disciplines, such as law, industrial engineering, mathematics and sociology. These guides contain, for example, tools to help university teachers avoid partial or biased interpretations that treat man as the universal subject. Olivella said: "This is a step forward towards making university classrooms egalitarian and inclusive spaces where transformative knowledge is generated and future professionals learn to apply critical thinking in order to achieve a fairer society."

On the organizational side, the UOC has taken a crucial step forward in tackling gender-based violence, approving its regulations against sexual harassment and discrimination based on sex, sexual orientation and gender identity and/or expression. This new regulatory framework provides clearer definitions of what conducts are unacceptable, including a recognition of diversity of identity or gender expression and sexual orientation and ensuring the rights of LGBTQI people. 

These regulations, which are based on the protocol for the prevention, detection, handling and resolution of cases of sexual harassment and harassment on the grounds of sex, sexual orientation, and gender identity and/or expression, expand the scope of the rules beyond the academic and management staff covered by the previous protocol to include the entire academic community, i.e. students, alumni, affiliated teaching staff, contractors and associated organizations. To develop them, the UOC's Equality Unit worked together with the Legal Office, Personnel, the Office of the Vice President and external specialists.

Finally to mark the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women on 25 November, the UOC created an interactive course on awareness of gender equality, aimed at all the university's employees, which was taken by nearly 400 people.