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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