Elite Professionals Archive: Tech Stars Under 30 - Hugh Hopkins and SO News

It's March! So it's time for my next article for http://eliteprofessionals.org/ on UK based young professionals. This time it's Hugh Hopkins and Selly Oak News. Are you from a Brummie business looking to target advertising at University of Birmingham Students? Give them a shout ;)

If there is one thing that my generation have had relentlessly drummed into them it’s the amazing potential of social media. Yet actually meeting young people who have turned this potential into a viable business is a surprisingly rare experience. This is where Hugh Hopkins and Selly Oak News come in.
Hugh (the one in the pink), was in the same halls of residence as I was in my first year at uni. He’s always struck me as a highly ambitious and capable future businessman, so it was no surprise to me when I heard that, together with co-founders Nick Day and Jonathan Craven, he had set up his own business. And, unlike many student businesses, it was going places.

Selly Oak News is an online platform for student news, media and opinion. It started out as a twitter feed and now, just over a year later, it’s a fully-fledged online service complete with a vast and ever growing following.Not bad for a bunch of university students.
So, eager to find out what’s next on the agenda, I caught up with Hugh earlier this week.

Tell us a bit about you and your background, what are your main interests and aspirations?
I’m in my third and final year at Birmingham University reading Business Management with Communications. In my first year I was elected the Entertainments Officer for my hall and it started a growing interest, as well as my confidence, in starting large projects and seeing them through. This also intertwined with my interest in the News and Media industry and how the internet is revolutionising the production and communication of content.

I have big aspirations, perhaps some of them are a little crazy and I’m cautious of actually listing them. I can say that it involves the creation of an international business.

In a few sentences, sum up what your company does and your role within it
SO News provides instant news tailored to University of Birmingham students on an interactive and unbiased platform. Nick Day, Jonathan Craven and I founded the business about a year ago and we’ve already managed to turn a profit. We each have specialised roles but mine is to run day to day operations of the news and just push the business forward.

Where did the idea for your company come from?
The idea came to us in a fast food shop. We were just chatting about Selly Oak and how information for students is fragmented and often out of date. Starting a news site to solve this seemed simple and since then the initial concept has grown significantly. We’ve created a platform on which we can create some truly great services and SO News is just the start.

What would you say has been your single greatest challenge in getting this far?
It’s hard to pinpoint a moment but at times it has been a challenge to keep momentum. All three of us are still students and apart from our own desire to create a great service there are very few reasons why we should start and run our own business.

What’s been your high point?
When we were awarded a £2,000 grant from Birmingham University’s Entrepreneurship and Innovation centre it transformed us into a serious business. It gave us a huge moral boost, meant we could invest in producing better content and organise ourselves as tangible business.

Where do you see you and your company in five years time?
The future of SO News is highly dependent on the next few months but we aim to be the most innovative source of high quality news and media. We would have established offices in Shoreditch and launched our side projects SO TV, SO Film and SO Music. We hope by then for SO news to have gained an international audience and we would be considering expansion outside of Europe. As for myself, remaining instrumental and innovating the business.

If you could give other budding professionals one piece of advice what would it be?
Be part of a business you enjoy.

For more information on Selly Oak News or to request some advertising space check out http://www.sonews.co.uk .

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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The Accidental Feminist

I never wanted to be a feminist.

In fact at school I’d occasionally get called a ‘feminist’ during debates in my politics classes as an insult. And I’d take it as such, furiously denying that I was anything of the sort.

Like a depressingly high proportion of my generation I believed that Women’s Rights and Feminism were dead issues. The Women’s Rights revolution had already happened. We live in an equal world, and anyone still kicking about that old chestnut was either of the misguided opinion that women deserve superiority over men or was just plain odd.

It wasn’t until something bad happened that I began to take gender equality and feminism seriously.

In my first year at uni I was contacted by a friend I hadn’t spoken to in a couple of years. After meeting up with her it became apparent that the reason I hadn’t heard from her was because she’d been involved in an abusive relationship.

It was the usual story: her former boyfriend had started off incredibly charming, won her over and showered her with all sorts of affection. Until they started living together at which point he began to change, became more and more demanding, selfish, controlling and angry, changed the affection for insults and psychological games, he’d go out with his friends when he pleased but bully her out of seeing hers and into staying in the house, and even starting to abusively threaten her.

It was after the first time that he physically hurt her that she made the decision to leave him. But visible damage had already been done. The first time I met up with her after that relatively short space of time the outgoing, confident girl I knew was uncomfortable just being out in public.

This got me thinking about two things:

1) How shockingly easy it is for intelligent outgoing women to be sucked into abusive relationships through no fault of their own

And

2) Said friend is very wealthy and she was only able to build up the courage to leave her ex whilst he was out of the country. What happens to women who don’t have separate incomes or this kind of absence to allow escape?

Then I started researching domestic abuse charities and my journey into becoming a feminist snowballed from there. Here are some fun facts for you:

-          Domestic abuse is the second most frequently reported crime in the UK

-          Domestic abuse charities receive less per annum in donations than donkey sanctuaries

We live in a country where the population value abused donkeys over abused women.

Something’s not quite right here.

From there I looked into issues in the UK like the wage gap, the fact that when applying for graduate jobs most employers will see the likelihood that I will probably one day have children as a reason not to employ me, the massive discrepancy between the women in certain industries (like PR) and the number of women managers and a whole host of international issues from gendercide to human trafficking and bride abduction, to the stoning of women for being raped in parts of Africa and the Middle East.

And I realised that I have a problem with this. Therefore I am a feminist.

Women in the UK are letting themselves down. The Women’s Rights Revolution only happened in the last few generations. Where my grandmother dreamt of being a secretary and marrying a rich man my mother is a doctor with her own pretty decent independent income.

The change is recent. As a result many culturally entrenched views on women, what they can and can’t do, how competent they are in the workplace and what they are good for are still pervasive.

You only have to look at the city and see that the stereotypical ‘business man’s night out’ of taking clients to a lap dancing club is still very much a common place or look at the composition of the Houses of Parliament to note the preponderance of men compared to women.

There’s also the case that now women have all the rights of men, but are still expected to fulfil the traditional ‘duties’ of a woman. In many families both parents have to work in order to create a comfortable lifestyle, or, in low income families, just to pay the bills. Who then has to do all the additional work of cooking, cleaning and childrearing? In most cases it’s the woman. I’m not saying that we should create a generation of house husbands but we do need to work towards making it more culturally acceptable for men to take on a more equal part in these domestic roles.

This is not me saying that ‘men’ are to blame. Of course they aren’t. Yes a small minority hold misogynistic views but there are almost certainly an equal number of women with extreme views on men, or even women with misogynistic views on women. Both genders are as bad (and good) as each other.

The problem now is changing cultural perceptions that are held by both men and women in our society. We need people to recognise that yes there have been mighty leaps forward in tackling gender inequality over the past century, but we’re not finished yet.

Where homosexual and ethnic minority groups are still pushing to end the discrimination against them which should by law be non-existent, women have, for the greater part, stopped trying.

The modern feminist movement isn’t about burning bras and shouting slogans. It’s about promoting the idea that it is ok for women to complain if they are treated unfairly just for being women, without having all the negative stereotypes of ‘the crazy feminist’ thrust upon them.

So I implore you, leave behind any qualms you might have about boot wearing, hairy faced, man hating nutters and bear in mind this modern view of what a feminist is: someone who has a problem with the statistics and thinks things need to change.

And with this far more realistic definition in mind; there are plenty of men and women I know who’d probably be horrified to learn that they are feminists too.

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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International Women's Week

Another big part of my life is campaigning for human rights and against gender based on discrimination. I am also part of the rather fantastic UpRising Leadership programme (expect a massively nerdy blog post about how awesome it is in the next few days, but until then for more info check out: http://www.uprising.org.uk/). So I am currently combining these parts of life to create a Social Action Project with fellow UpRiser Dominica Kaczkowska. We want to work on rebranding 'feminism', defeating the negative stereotypes associated with the word and raise awareness of gender inequality issues across the world. And this is step one of the our plan: to create an 'International Women's Week' at the University of Birmingham surrounding International Women's Day on the 8th March 2012.


I am a feminist. But contrary to the negative and unrepresentative stereotype I don't hate men and, to be honest, if women actively choose to stay home, not work and raise kids or whatever good for them, all I have a problem with are the statistics:


UK:


- On average female managers are paid £10,000 less per annum then male colleagues doing identical jobs. (http://www.myfinances.co.uk/pensions/2011/08/31/cmi-report-reveals-gender-pay-gap-will-take-98-years-to-equa)


- The second highest reported crime in the UK is domestic abuse, accounting for 25% of all reports. On average a woman will be beaten 32 times before she seeks help. On average women approach between 5-12 agencies for help before receiving an appropriate and sympathetic response. (http://www.birmingham.gov.uk/cs/Satellite?c=Page&childpagename=Equalities%2FPageLayout&cid=1223092717880&pagename=BCC%2FCommon%2FWrapper%2FWrapper)


Around the world:


- Female genital mutilation is practised in Africa, the Middle East and parts of Asia. Worldwide an estimated 135million girls experience genital cutting. Predominantly it is not a religious but a cultural practice to sublimate female sexuality. Girls generally undergo the procedure between the age of 7-12. Many develop uncontrollable bleeding and some do not survive. It is often women who perform the procedures and perpetuate the cycle.  http://www.dosomething.org/tipsandtools/11-facts-about-female-genital-mutilation


- .Gender-based violence is one of the biggest causes of injury and death to women across the world causing more deaths and disability among women aged 15 to 44 than cancer, malaria, traffic accident, and war.


- In China and India parents often use sex determination tests to find out if their foetus is a girl. Of 8,000 fetuses aborted at one Bombay clinic, 7,999 were female. There is also rising concern about mass infanticide of new born and baby girls across the two nations. (http://www.dosomething.org/tipsandtools/11-poignant-facts-about-women-around-world )
(For a particularly harrowing description of how apparently common the murder of newborn baby girls is in modern rural China, and some to the point facts check out: http://www.economist.com/node/15636231?story_id=15636231)


Many people think Women's Rights is a dead and irrelevant issue. Plenty also assume that to be a feminist is to be a man-hating, boot wearing, bra burning nutter. Dominika and I plan on doing everything we can to change these two entirely erroneous assumptions, starting with students at the University of Birmingham.


Our Plan:

We are going to start by organising a week of events surrounding International Women’s Day on the 8^th March 2012. Each day we will be raising money for different charities (to be decided in a meeting with interested groups) and highlighting a different issue. We will also be inviting in external organisations and charities to provide workshops and information on issues relevant to that particular day's theme. We also want to work with University of Birmingham societies to put on an array of student friendly events and get as many different sections of uni society involved as possible. We'd love to work with as many different groups as possible, men, women, transgender and everyone inbetween, I know it's not only women who think arbitrary discrimination based on gender is wrong.

We also plan on reserving International Women's Day (8th March) itself for celebrating just how far we have come down the road to securing gender equality and raising awareness of the amazing work individual women and women's organisations do world wide.

It will be University of Birmingham based this coming year but we are already starting to forge contacts with women’s groups across Birmingham to bring in outside speakers and find local charities to fundraise for. We want to make International Women’s Week an annual event and to, eventually, help extend it to a Birmingham wide event by working with existing groups with similar aims.

What do societies have to do to get involved?


We will ask all interested groups to fundraise a small amount (amount to be determined later) each in preparation for International Women's Week then donate at least 50% of the profits from their individual events to their selected charity.


Why would societies get involved?


If the facts aren't enough to tempt you to help create change this might: the amount per group raised in advance will go towards printing brochures for the week containing a listing of 'International Women's Week' associated events combined with selected short facts and statistics about gender discrimination. We plan on handing out these brochures in the weeks prior to the event, promoting it online and running an info stall and bake sale outside the library every day of International Women's Week. In short it's excellent publicity for the society and event in question and since only 50% of the profits are required to go to the selected charities the society will earn some money too.


We want to get as many societies involved as possible. So I'm starting recruiting and advertising as soon as term starts. If you're a University of Birmingham society council member you will probably hear from me via email or at guild forums in a month or so but if you're interested and you'd like to contact me before then comment on this post and I'll send you my email address :)

Contrary to what too many believe gender inequality is still an issue. The world needs modern feminists. In this mass information age ignorance is no excuse. And you don’t even have to be a woman to think that getting paid 10grand less than a colleague simply for having a pair of tits, or the systematic destruction of babies purely for having the audacity to be born a particular gender is wrong.

I believe fighting gender discrimination world wide is an important issue. I hope that, even if you'd never thought about it before, after reading this you do too.


H.B.
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New Blog

I have too many blogs. There's my social action project blog (I'm organising a week of events surrounding international women's day on the 8th March highlighting gender inequality issues across the world), my etsy shop blog (SoWhatIt'sVintage - selling good quality vintage clothing with a no nonsense, reasonable prices approach http://www.etsy.com/shop/sowhatitsvintage) and my travel blog (I've just got back from 24 days interrailing round Eastern Europe and am deluded enough to think someone might be interested in my experiences) and on top of that there's all the other stuff I do, influential people I meet and articles I write that don't fit into any of the aforementioned sections. So I'm amalgamating all of them into one great big mighty blog of experience. I find it interesting, and I like to think some other people killing time on the world wide web do too....maybe...meh enjoy!

H.B.
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