VR Balance

VR Balance: training gender equality by living it in first person

EU-funded project · Gender equality training in virtual reality

3: workshops
6: scenarios
5 h: training

The context

A European project that turns equality into a lived experience

VR Balance is an EU-funded initiative that uses virtual reality to teach gender equality through direct experience rather than slides. Instead of explaining inequality, it lets people feel what it is like, in first person.

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Everyone agrees on equality. Few people feel the gap.

Inequality is rarely one dramatic event — it builds up in small, everyday moments. Across the EU, women earn about 11% less per hour and do roughly 86% more unpaid work at home (Eurostat).

The workshops

Three workshops, one lived experience

Each workshop tackles a different angle of the gender gap — explored in first person through virtual reality.

Workshop poster — Who Cares? Breaking gender stereotypes in caregiving. — Workshop 1 · Who Cares? The Care Gap

Workshop poster — Smashing the Glass Ceiling: gender bias in the workplace. — Workshop 2 · Smashing the Ceiling

Workshop poster — Walk in Their Shoes: experience gender inequality through virtual reality. — Workshop 3 · Walk in Their Shoes

You can't change what you don't feel. With VR, we make you feel it.

Each session follows the same rhythm: live a scenario in first person, talk through what you felt, and turn it into a concrete plan to take back to your organization.

From the sessions

Real moments at the University of Barcelona

Scenes from the sessions and dissemination events run with students and staff — including an online session with 80+ participants.

Students gathered around the VR Balance stand at the University of Barcelona. — Students at the stand

Group photo from the students’ session at the University of Barcelona, Bellvitge Campus. — Session for students · Bellvitge

A participant next to the VR Balance roll-up banner at the University of Barcelona. — At the stand · University of Barcelona

The VR Balance team thanking participants after a session. — A thank-you from the team

Recap of the online VR Balance session attended by more than 80 participants. — Online session · 80+ participants

VR Balance tote bags and printed materials handed out at the sessions. — Materials handed out at the sessions

Scientific evidence

Results already shared with the academic community

The University of Barcelona team has taken the program to an international congress and to a peer-reviewed journal.

Congress · accepted poster

Flipping the Script in Health Sciences

Evaluation with 161 participants: 70.3% satisfaction and a shift toward seeing inequality as structural, not individual. 9th International Health Sciences Congress, July 2026.

Congress · accepted poster

Multicentric Online Dissemination Events

Three national webinars (Poland, Spain and Lithuania, more than 190 participants) with one shared 90-minute structure, in each national language.

Journal · under review

A VR-enhanced educational program on gender equity

Original article submitted to Educación Médica (Elsevier) with 167 students and staff: the activities linking concepts to personal experience rated highest.

See the publications and abstracts

Why it matters

Decisions made with empathy reach further than any briefing

When the people who decide — who to promote, how a policy is written, how the next generation is taught — have felt the gap rather than only read about it, equality stops being a poster on the wall and starts showing up in everyday practice.

If you recognize your own situation here, let's talk about how it could work for you.

Partners & funding

Built by a European partnership

Co-funded by the European Union and coordinated by the University of Barcelona, with the Social Innovation Fund and the Women Entrepreneurship Foundation as training experts and MetaMedicsVR as the virtual reality and AI partner.

Visit the project website

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