International Day of Women and Girls in Science 2026

Without women, the study of radioactivity would have been different; Kevlar would possibly have had to wait for better days; software compilers would be an enigma; wireless communications might have had difficulty communicating; tectonic plates would have made the least studied tremble; and cars would have stopped with the first downpours due to the lack of windshield wipers. Life would not be the same. And it wouldn't have the same ingenuity or even humor. And it is for these and many other examples that should emerge in the coming times, that this Wednesday is the International Day of Women and Girls in Science.

The Faculty of Sciences of the University of Lisbon (Ciências ULisboa) also did not let the February 11 anniversary pass unnoticed, giving voice to several inspiring women in our community, among them a protagonist who makes a difference compared to the last 115 years: Conceição Freitas, a professor with a career built in the Department of Earth Sciences and Energy, became the first woman to assume the direction of the Faculty on January 20. And he immediately proclaimed: "Leadership has no gender."

In a perfect world, this would be a mere description of gender equality, but in the real world, the scenario is different. “Despite the progress of the last few decades, we still live in a world dominated by men. In a universe where women represent a percentage very close to 50% of graduates and 41% of academic staff in Europe, only about 24 to 28% are in management positions,” Conceição Freitas recently highlighted to Forbes Portugal magazine.

The numbers reveal that Ciências ULisboa should have no problem finding future female leaders, just as it had no problem integrating, in 1936, the first female full professor of exact and natural sciences in Portugal, leaving the name Branca Edmée Marques in history. It is possible to detect room for progress – but today, Ciências ULisboa can say that it has already done a large part of this work, currently having 32 female directors, compared to the 16 director positions currently held by men.

On the other hand, in teaching positions, there are 237 men and 172 women. Among scholarship holders and researchers, there is a slight female majority – and it is in technical and administrative staff that women overwhelmingly predominate, with almost twice as many men.

Although the reasons may be more related to cultural trends than to internal regulations guaranteeing equity for all members of the Ciências ULisboa community, the numbers are somewhat different among students. According to the Register of Enrolled and Graduated Students in Higher Education (RAIDES), women accounted for 42% of undergraduate enrollments, 45.5% of master's programs, and 47.6% of doctoral programs in the 2024/2025 academic year. Despite the discrepancies being small, these numbers still contrast with the national demographics: today, women represent 52.7% of the Brazilian population.

If there were any doubts, these statistics also serve as further justification for the International Day of Women and Girls in Science to be celebrated by various national institutions, including Ciências ULisboa. Every day is a good day to have women in science – and even to discover what Artificial Intelligence, which has all genders and no genders at the same time, says about the subject. This is the theme for the videoconference session that the Laboratory of Instrumentation and Experimental Particle Physics (LIP) has scheduled for this wednesday at 2:30 pm.

It is to this annual wave of celebrations that the Ciências ULisboa Portal also joins, publishing inspiring quotes from some of the best-known female figures in our Faculty. Because even when done by men, Science is always written in the feminine.