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Planning and acting with empathy, responsibility, and care for humans and our planet creates a sustainable environment. A sustainable ecosystem requires access to a set of renewable resources with high availability. Such resources should be harnessed and used in harmony with the environment, without damaging the life of all beings. Excessive use of resources, even renewable ones, poses a real challenge in terms of environmental degradation and worsening climatic conditions. Such threats are realistic for humanity if consumer-led habits are not mediated with competences on sustainability. This research considers that education and training in the field of environment and sustainability are important, having a positive role in the decisive actions to be taken. Focusing on what Romanian students believe about the need to incorporate environmental education into university programs, the paper explores the importance of building complementary skills in the field of sustainability through educational initiatives and other industry-academia partnerships.

The COVID-19 pandemic along with lockdowns, distancing measures and school closures affected individuals both at work and in their family. Disparities that existed before the pandemic have been amplified by the measures taken to combat this new disease. In this regard, a field in focus is the engagement of women in academic community of scientific research. Our study aims to assess the COVID-19 impact on papers published by the research teams in Romanian journals indexed WOS – Economics and to investigate whether the number of female authors of a paper influences the probability of the paper being cited in WOS. The statistical investigation comprised both descriptive analysis and logistic regression. The results highlight that approximately 60% of the research studies have a male first author. Moreover, most of the manuscripts have 2 to 4 authors and 24% of them have no female author and only 15% of them have no male author. The findings reveal that the share of papers with a female first author is approximately 40% in both pre and post pandemic years. The number of studies written by mixed teams increased in 2021 compared to 2020 and 2019, while the numbers show lower values for the ones written exclusively by females in 2019 and 2021 compared to 2020. Our results of the logit regression model suggest that the probability of a research paper being cited in WOS relies on the year of publication, the number of pages as well as the number of female authors.