President of FCT receives Maria de Lourdes Pintasilgo Award

The Instituto Superior Técnico held the Maria de Lourdes Pintasilgo award ceremony on December 6th. As in previous years, the 5th edition of the award honoured a young graduate of the institution whose research has been recognized for its scientific merit and a former student who, having completed her studies at Instituto Superior Técnico more than 15 years ago, has stood out for her professional career and/or social contributions. In this edition, the prize was unanimously awarded, respectively, in each category, to Maria Teresa Parreira, for the quality of the research carried out in her master's dissertation and for her active involvement in student support activities, and to Helena Pereira, president of the FCT's Board of Directors, for her "meritorious efforts in holding demanding high-level public positions at the service of the academic and scientific community" and for her contribution to the "progress of science" and "technological innovation", according to the jury's opinion.

The Gender Balance@Técnico working group was responsible for creating and awarding this prize, which is entirely for women, and whose intentions were well highlighted by the group's coordinator, Beatriz Silva: faced with a context of "under-representation of women in STEM areas", created and perpetuated by a history of gender prejudices - among them, the idea that "engineering is for men" - it became necessary to implement active measures to counteract these imbalances, of which this prize is intended to be an example.

The figure who gives it its name and motto, Maria de Lourdes Pintasilgo, stood out, at a time when women's social roles were strongly conditioned by the regime, for her "affirmation in the space of men", in the words of Rogério Colaço, president of the Instituto Superior Técnico, being one of only three women - out of a student body of around 250 - to study at the institution at the end of the 1940s, and becoming, in the 1950s, the first woman to be accepted into CUF's senior technical staff, and later asserting herself in politics as the only woman, to date, to head a government in Portugal. At the present time, when "equal opportunities between the sexes is still a long way off and has not been achieved", the president of Técnico. stressed the need to continue the fight for gender equality. More than just a tribute to the figure of Maria de Lourdes Pintasilgo, the award is intended to "help ensure that this path [of effective gender equality] continues to be followed", by rewarding key contributions to science and technology by female students and former students of Técnico, and thus highlighting their work.

The awardees also attached great importance to the broader purposes of the prize. The young recipient, Maria Teresa Parreira, highlighted, in what she called the more "political" aspect of her speech, the idea that "we can't recline in our chairs and pat ourselves on the shoulder that the progress that is already being made is going in the right direction and doesn't need us". For her part, Helena Pereira pointed out that she recognizes that her career, marked on the one hand by her time at the Instituto Superior Técnico and the early recognition of the quality of her work by national and international institutions and, on the other, by the FCT board, has contributed, in her words, to a "fantastic period of growth [in science] that we have experienced over the last 30 years", and will have "inspired some" - or, we could say, some.

In addition to the undeniable personal, academic and professional merit of the winners, which was underlined in all the speeches, all the speakers at the session, from the heads of the institution promoting the award to the winners themselves, always stressed the important social and political dimension of promoting this type of initiative, which is still necessary despite the fact that, as Rogério Colaço pointed out, we are already in the 21st century. Maria Leonor Beleza's speech, in her capacity as president of the Champalimaud Foundation, once again challenged the male majority in positions of power, calling this very point into question, highlighting the "unequal sharing [between genders] of power at the highest levels", despite the fact that there tend to be more women with higher education. To close the session, Manuel Heitor, in his capacity as Minister of Science, Technology and Higher Education, highlighted the work of the award winners, affirming the need to continue the debate on gender issues, in order to address the horizontal and vertical dimensions of inequality and, given the near absence of women at the top of teaching, scientific and business careers, "to recognize those who have actually had the merit of making it to the top" despite the structural conditions of disadvantage.