The history of MeToo University did not begin in 2011, as some recent accounts have tried to suggest. Its roots go back to the early 1990s, when the first complaint of sexual harassment in Spanish universities was made at the request of then-student Lídia Puigvert. In 1995, with the support of Professor Ramón Flecha, she initiated a process that broke a culture of silence surrounding gender violence in academia. This milestone is what set in motion decades of struggle, research, and advocacy that later consolidated into the MeToo University movement.
These pioneering steps unfolded in a context where Spanish universities were deeply hierarchical, and victims faced enormous barriers to speak out. The solidarity shown by Puigvert and other early voices was not isolated; it aligned with the creation of CREA (Community of Research on Excellence for All) in 1991, which explicitly challenged the “omertà” prevailing in universities. From that foundation, the fight grew: scientific projects, student mobilizations, and civil society alliances in the 2000s made visible what institutions wanted to deny.
One of the major turning points came with the first research on gender violence in universities in Spain and Catalonia between 2003 and 2008, funded by the Spanish National R&D Plan (Plan Estatal de I+D+i) and by AGAUR (Agency for the Management of University and Research Grants), both led by Professor Rosa Valls.. The scientific, social, and political impact of this pioneering project was enormous. Its findings led the Spanish Parliament to modify the University Act on April 4, 2007, (Agencia Estatal Boletín Oficial del Estado, 2007; 2011) obliging universities to recognize sexual harassment in academia and to take measures to overcome it. Only six months later, on October 5 of the same year, a Royal Decree was passed that ended the feudal system of faculty selection and promotion, replacing it with a meritocratic system that reduced the power dynamics which had long perpetuated harassment.
The Solidarity Network of Victims of Gender Violence in Universities—the predecessor of MeToo University—was formally created in 2013, long before the global #MeToo explosion. It was recognized by Spain’s National Gender Violence Observatory as a good practice and achieved landmark victories, such as the first successful harassment case in a Spanish university and, later, the incorporation of “Isolating Gender Violence” into regional legislations.
Attempts to erase this long trajectory and present MeToo University as something new from 2011 are deliberate manipulations that silence victims and minimize decades of collective struggle. The truth is clear: this movement was born from the courage of early pioneers in the 1990s, consolidated through solidarity in the 2000s, and today stands as a global reference in the fight against gender violence in academia.
References
– Soler-Gallart, M., & Joanpere, M. (2024). The struggles against gender violence in Spanish universities and how they contributed to changing legislation. ANNALES, Series historia et sociologia, 34, 357-366. https://doi.org/10.19233/ASHS.2024.24
