Vote 'Henrietta is Better' for Women's Officer!!

I’m running for Women’s Officer at University of Birmingham!! So here’s a quick blog post to let you know what I’m all about and what I plan on doing if I win.

As you UofB’ers may have noticed the Women’s Rights movement within the University of Birmingham is pretty dead. No one at all ran for Women’s Officer in the first round of elections last academic year and even now in the by-elections there are only two candidates standing for it.

 I want to change all this.

I first found out that we don’t currently have a Women’s Officer by accident. I’ve been working on organising a week of events surrounding International Women’s Day in March for a couple of months now and I figured the best way to get it off the ground with the guild would be to get the Women’s Officer on board. At which point I was told there wasn’t one.

To begin with I was pretty shocked but then I realised, if it hadn’t been for unfortunate events in my own life (see the post below) I wouldn’t particularly care about women’s rights either. It’s hardly a well-publicised area of concern and the crazy feminist stereotype (unfairly in my opinion) associated with campaigning for Women’s Rights is pretty off putting for most people. So I decided ‘you know what, this is something I care about and I really believe I can make a difference’ and I’m running for it.

In the UK recently released statistics show that female managers are paid an average of £10,000 less a year then male colleagues doing exactly the same job. This is technically illegal and recent legislation now means that all employees have the right to ask what their colleagues are being paid. If I win the election I will organise some workshops on ‘How to Be Assertive in the Workplace’ teaching women how to find out if they are being treated unfairly and what to do about it.

The second most frequently reported crime in the UK is domestic violence. An average of one in four women will experience domestic abuse in their life time. If I win the election I will promote domestic abuse charities around campus with the aim that, if a woman in this establishment encounters abuse they know where to go to get help. I will also raise awareness of organisations working with men who are afraid of becoming abusers. Often abusers don’t set out to be violent to their partners and if I can help make them aware of where to get help before it is too late I think it’d be in the best interests of the whole university community.

Around the world there are many issues affecting women; from forced marriage to gendercide in China and India to FGM and sex trafficking. In the week surrounding International Women’s Day (8^th March) I will organise a week of events, working with both external charities and university societies, to raise awareness of a different gender inequality issue each day and fundraise for selected charities. I've already started contacting university societies and have found a selection of charities and brummie business women and journalists who are interested in supporting this idea and working together to make this event a reality. It was through starting to organise this that I first found out that there wasn't a Women’s Officer so, even if I don’t win the election, I will still try and run this event…though of course being Women’s Officer would definitely make the paperwork a lot easier!

So that’s what I want to do and I hope you agree that ‘Henrietta is Better’ for Women’s Rights and Vote Henrietta between October 24^th and 28^th!!

H.B.

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Exploration Article Archive: Gendercide

Here's the latest article I've written for Exploration Online Magazine (as you can probably tell I've got women's right's issues on the brain at the mo!). For those who have stumbled across this page looking up the International Women's Week project 'All Girls Allowed' is one of the charities I'm going to propose fundraising for.

Please also bear in mind that I've tried to keep this article as short as possible and I haven't touched on other issues such as the fact that suicide is now the most common form of death amongst women aged 15-34 in rural China. Many studies link this to their inability to cope with knowing their daughters have been aborted or murdered. So err as you can see it's a lot more serious then my previous Exploration Asia offerings but, as I'm sure you'll agree, it's an incredibly serious issue.

In this article I’m not going to write about an amusing travelling anecdote, review a travel book or recommend a youth hostel. Instead I am going to talk about a disturbing cultural trend that is visible throughout much of China, India, Korea and Singapore as well as parts of Eastern Europe. The dramatic rise in the number of baby boys compared to girls as a result of the selective destruction of female foetuses and the shocking commonality of the murder or new born baby girls. This trend is more commonly known as ‘gendercide’.

As most of us are probably aware, it is a fair bit tougher being a woman in much of Asia than it is in the UK. I first heard of the ‘gendercide’ and the associated issues a couple of years ago from a South Korean lady called Wisteria.

Wisteria never wanted to get married. In South Korea women are still, generally speaking, expected to fulfil all of the stereotypical gender roles that we in the UK associate more with the first half of the 20^th century then the second decade of the 21^st. She wanted a career. And combining that with the over 40 hours of cooking, cleaning, tidying, caring for family members and attending to her husband and children’s needs the average Korean wife is expected to do a week would be impossible.

In this modern era of readily available ultra-sound scans these strongly held gender stereotypes have had some quite brutally shocking and unexpected consequences on the composition of many Asian communities, particularly with regard to male to female ratios.

The Asian country with the male to female children ratio most above what is statistically natural is China. To many this at first appears to be an unprecedented side effect of the one child policy – it is more profitable for couples to have a boy than a girl. Inheritance is passed through the male line and far more traditional approaches to gender roles see men being culturally valued and considered more lucrative to their families than women.

Where couples can only have one child, as in many provinces in China, those who can afford it will often take gender tests to try and ensure that child is male by aborting female foetuses. In poorer regions of rural China where gender tests aren’t so readily available or affordable there are many truly horrendous reports about just how wide spread the murder of new born baby girls, and the blind eye the authorities turn to it, is.

To put into perspective how wide spread this phenomena is recent estimates show that over the next decade there will be an estimated 30-40 million more men aged 19 or below than women in China. These men, unable to find brides and see the increase in social standing that being well married affords them are known as ‘bare branches’.

Rather than simply being an unwanted side effect of the one child policy ‘bare branches’ are an increasing feature in other countries with similar cultural views on women that don’t operate a one child policy. In India, for instance, women are generally expected to leave their parents family upon marriage and join their husbands. Parents wanting to increase the family wealth and be taken care of in their old age want sons.

As a result ‘gendercide’ is a feature there just as it is in China. In recent surveys one Bombay clinic reported that out of the last 8000 abortions they had performed 7999 where on female foetuses.

The ‘bare branches’, the unmarried young men this cultural preference produces bear hazards of their own. Over the past 20 years the crime rate in China has doubled. In all affected countries tales of bride abduction, trafficking women and widespread rape are common place. Many studies state that a correlation between this and the unnatural male to female ratio are most likely linked. It’s a serious situation.

Based on the unnatural male to female ration in these parts of the world as many as a staggering 163million baby girls have been aborted, murdered, left to die or are simply ‘missing’. Charities such as Save the Children and UNICEF are doing some work to put a stop to this devastating practice, but specific programmes are few, far between and hard to locate. One which is doing some amazing work in the area is the relatively unknown ‘All Girls Allowed’ (check out http://www.allgirlsallowed.org/ending-gendercide to find out more).

This is not to say that Asia isn’t an amazing, incredible and beautiful place to visit. In fact you are probably wondering why I am writing about such a serious matter on a light-hearted travel website. I think that if you are going to travel to a region and you really want to get to know it, its culture and history, it is important to know what issues exist below the surface. It is easy to be a tourist and just focus on the nice, attractive holiday hotspots but it is only through seeing what is really going on beneath the gloss, the negative as well as the good, that you can truly say you have experienced Asia.

If you are at all interested in finding out more about the ‘gendercide’, its causes and consequences or the Eastern European side of the story take a look at a now old but still incredible informative article from the Economist last year http://www.economist.com/node/15636231?story_id=15636231 and the many articles the same magazine has run on the subject since.

Or Chinese journalist Xinran’s book Message from an Unknown Chinese Mother which features a compilation of real life stories from those who have given up, aborted or abandoned their daughters.

H.B.

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International Women's Week: The Plan

I've spent all morning at the societies fair telling groups to 'check out my blog for more info'...so I should probably actually put some more info up.

Basically I want to organise a week of events surrounding international women's day on 8th March. Each day I want to fundraise for a different related charity and raise awareness of gender inequality issues from across the globe. I'm already starting to contact external organisations and charities to try and get a mix of folks to come in, offer workshops and hand out leaflets etc.

The 8th March itself will be devoted to championing the great work that women do around the world, and the amazing leaps and bounds forwards in gender equality we've seen over the past century. I've already started chatting to some prominent business women about getting involved and am going to start contacting various authors, politicians, charitable campaigners and all sorts of people too.

So where do University Societies come in?

I want University Societies to help out by running an event or events of their own during International Women's Week to raise awareness of/money for fighting the issues we're going to highlight. Or if they can't/don't want to get that involved just raise awareness of the event and promote it to their members.

I want all sorts of people from different social, cultural, ethnic, departmental, whatever, backgrounds involved. I believe these issues affect people across the board and the best way to get individuals interested is through first person contact. I can send a million emails about this, but nothing will persuade people to come and get involved more than word of mouth.

So you've decided your group might quite like to run a pub quiz/bake sale/sponsored something/play/performance/bar crawl/lecture/unusual fundraiser, what then?

We will put all of the information about your event in a nice shiney booklet detailing the programme for the week and short profiles on involved societies. These booklets will be distributed around campus and the info will also be readily available online so it's a lot of great publicity for your group! We will be asking for a donation (amount tbc) to go towards printing costs, and a minimum of 50% of your event's profits to go to selected charities but you get to keep up to 50% of the profits to put back into your groups own events. So it's a pretty good deal really!

The kind of issues I want to highlight are things like domestic abuse, the wage gap, the gendercide in China and India, sex trafficking and FGM...I don't think you just have to be a woman or a feminist to care about stuff like this and think it's wrong. That's why I want to work with as many different kinds of societies and people as possible.

The charities we are fund-raising for and the issues we're highlighting haven't been decided yet and will be voted on in a meeting with interested groups, so if you've got a particular issue or charity you want us to focus on, let us know!

So I hope you fancy getting involved! If you've got any questions, want to help out or anything at all email me at HXB916@bham.ac.uk and I'll get back to you asap!

ta

H.B.
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