The victims of sexual intimidation in public places will be able to file a civil complaint. Local authorities will have the opportunity of punishing sexism using anti-social behaviour fines.”
Rock on, Joëlle.
Notbuyingit – a hashtag, an app, a movement
After the mobile app against street harassment, here is the next one: this time against sexism in the media. Based on the idea that the consumer makes the ultimate choice in our society by voting with her money, Missrepresentation.org believes we have the right and opportunity to talk back and influence the media we buy. Can we teach the media a lesson and demand a change in how women are represented? Can we together put pressure on certain companies and make them produce different ads? And if at all, will a mobile app help in this?
The NotBuyingIt app is a project initiated by the people behind Missrepresentation who are are partnering with body image experts at Emer.ge to create a mobile app to fight sexist and damaging media and celebrate the positive. It is asserted that 3 out of 4 teen girls feel depressed, guilty and shameful after spending just 3 minutes looking through a fashion magazine. (These seem to be the US stats – but surely cannot be far from the European ones. If we have stats on this at all.)
So how did this idea came about? During the 2013 Super Bowl (the most watched and tweeted about media event of the year in the United Stated) the #NotBuyingIt hashtag was used by thousands and it became a trending topic on Twitter.
For the skeptics, here are some of the past successes from the MissRepresentation website this hashtag has had on Twitter:
- Pressured Amazon.co.uk to remove a line of t-shirts promoting rape in under 24 hours
- Forced America’s leading Halloween costume seller to change how it markets girls’ costumes
- Pressured a solar company to rescind a sexist ad campaign and delete their Facebook page
- Helped get Hallmark to remove a sexist greeting card in under 24 hours
- Helped get two children’s books that promoted gender stereotypes removed from the shelves of Harrod’s in London in under 24 hours
So how will the app work? “Using GPS technology we will pinpoint where the worst advertising is coming from and which communities are most active in fighting back. You’ll have the ability to document all the billboards and posters impacting your local community, putting pressure on brands and local officials to respond. Our scoreboard will keep track of progress in real time, ranking which products are deemed most sexist by the community and which ones we support.”
MissRepresentation has launched a campaign on Indiegogo, where you have 7 days left (till April 28) to contribute to the making of the app. Doubtful? Here is a quick motivational video 
An oldie but goldie
A few years ago, when I was working for a television company that had many niche channels in its portfolio (among them a cooking channel), we received an invitation to the “grand opening” of a new candy shop/ patisserie in downtown Budapest because we featured their cakes previously in one of our shows.
O p e n i n g party. I did not find it funny then, and I don’t find it funny now – I have found it quite offensive in fact. #notbuyingit, Sugar Shop.
(I will discuss the hashtag in another post in detail, but here is more info from the Missrepresentation website: “People worldwide are using hashtag #NotBuyingIt to call-out sexism in the media. Let the media know: sexism won’t sell. Use #NotBuyingIt on Twitter to challenge the misrepresentation of women and girls.”)
FGM
I can’t remember anymore when it was when I first heard about FGM or female genital mutilation. It must have been rather late, in my early 20s, at university (on my side of the world this was one of the miseries that women did not have to endure). What I clearly remember, however, is what shaped my thinking about it. After reading The Color Purple I became fascinated with Alice Walker. So I started reading her books one by one, and I soon got to Possessing the Secret of Joy. I was amazed, shocked and appalled by Tashi’s story, who undergoes this dreadful ritual as an adult and then tries to get on with her life in America. Walker broke taboos and at the same time raised awareness of this practice in the Western world when she wrote the book in 1992.
A few years ago I moved to a part of Europe where the number of immigrants is quite high from Northern Africa, and from French-speaking countries of Africa. I also work in an environment where most of my coworkers have lived in developing countries for decades and worked on missions trying to “make the world a better place.” Many of them are doctors and many volunteer for various NGOs in their free time, so I have become much more closely exposed to this issue. One of them very actively took part in the European Campaign of Amnesty International to End FGM (as the immigrants from these countries bring their culture with them, there are about 180,000 girls at risk in Europe of undergoing FGM. Worldwide, 3 million girls undergo FGM every year.) Recently I took a class on Gender, Diversity and Politics at a Brussels university and some people argued there that if we want to fully respect and protect multiculturalism, then we should not intervene and advocate for the end of FGM. We should let people do things according to rules of their own culture. I disagree in this case, strongly. I tend to agree more with Alice Walker (and my colleagues): ”Torture is not culture.”
This was only an intro to a video I stumbled upon on TED recently. It is a must see. The speaker, Kakenya Ntaiya made a deal with her father: She would undergo the traditional Maasai rite of passage of female circumcision if he would let her go to high school. Now she is changing the destiny of girls in her village by having built a school for them.
Not Your Baby – a smartphone app against harassment
A few days ago I wrote about Hollaback! (and its leader Emily May), the non-profit organization the mission of which is to end street harassment by empowering the targets. They recently hit the news in connection with a sofware application, namely a smartphone app called ‘Not Your Baby‘. This is a free app that is hoped to initiate dialogue around sexual harassment before they happen, but also during and after they happen. This unusual app was developed by Metrac, the Metropolitan Action Committee on Violence Against Women and Children, which prevents violence against diverse women and youth. Hollaback! was their partner a few years ago when they worked together on an online survey on responses to sexual harassment.
The app came out in September this year and got quite some media coverage. This is a screenshot from the app and there is more here in a Huffington Post article:
To be able to give an opinion I downloaded this app, but to be honest, I have doubts about whether it can work. You can type in where and from whom you are experiencing harassing behavior and a tailored advice pops up (along with a “random fact”) that suits the users needs, which derives from the above mentioned survey (200 people), but as the app grows, potentially more. However, to me it is unrealistic that in the actual moment I can just get my phone out and say/do something smart when I’m lost for words or simly, I’m too scared/bitten/hurt/embarrassed.
Nevertheless, I think such an app (or rather, incentive) can be useful for sharing information on what legal actions can be taken if harassment happens at the workplace, or what qualifies as harassment, or simly exchanging experiences and letting others know that they are not alone.
As this is my 4th or 5th post about street harassment, I need to say that I am very happy that I finally found a quote that touches upon a crucial thing when discussing this topic with others - Laura Bates, founder of the Everyday Sexism project, said: ”Many people tend to think of it as not particularly serious, with victims being told they are ‘overreacting’ or should ‘take it as a compliment’.” This, sadly, many times comes from our friends, parents, etc. Harassment is not a compliment. Anything that makes someone scared or uncomfortable, cannot be a compliment.
Sexism, video games, trolls
Anita Sarkeesian from Feminist Frequency is a feminist media critic who initiated a successful Kickstarter campaign to examine sexism and representations of women in video games. (Kickstarter is a fundign platform for creative projects.) Apparently, little did she know what this will bring out of some of the members of the gaming community. Shortly after, she fell victim to (cyber) harassment, and there was even a game developed where users could punch a photo of Sarkeesian.
Challenges and opportunities for female health systems researchers
This will be a crosspost of an article that appeared in BMJ Open. BMJ is an online medical journal (more info here) and they run a couple of blogs. One of these is the Open blog, where a post appeared which I had the chance (and honor) to co-author with 4 others. One of them is a medical student, two are health systems researchers and one of them is a journalist/media specialist/research associate. We were (are) all part of a project called Emerging Voices, which is an initiative of The Institute of Tropical Medicine in Belgium (my workplace). This Emerging Voices 2012 edition was supported by the 2nd Global Symposium on Health System Research.
We held an organized session at this conference (on October 31, 2012 in Beijing, China) and the following article grew out of the discussions that took place there. I will crosspost it as it was originally published.
Juggling personal and professional lives in search of the perfect balance is an art that women and men across the world, in different spheres of work, are familiar with. How does this play out in the life of a female health researcher? At the Health Systems Research Symposium held in Beijing recently, a group of young female public health professionals from the “Emerging Voices” programme came together with their male counterparts to discuss the challenges and opportunities they face and have observed as young female researchers in the field of health systems research.
Although improving today, the evident underrepresentation of women in leadership positions led to the idea of exploring the issue of the glass ceiling—a term that was first used in the 1980s to indicate the lack of women in leadership positions in the workplace. What began as a fishbowl discussion on the challenges faced by female researchers, opened up into a debate of the challenges facing women in the workplace generally, raising multiple questions.
At the heart of the discussion was the conflict between balancing a family life and career that most female participants feel they face. With extensive travel, often for extended periods of time and to remote locations, is health systems research a family friendly career option for women? Is time taken for maternity leave a barrier to promotion? Have organisations, communities, and smaller family units evolved enough to accept the role of women as professionals along with their more traditional roles as wives, mothers, and carers of the old, young, and infirm?
The personal-professional conflict was further reflected in anecdotal evidence of female PhD candidates being discouraged from having families alongside their academic commitments. There were examples of almost equally qualified men being selected over women for positions. There were also examples of workplace norms which encouraged longer work hours that indirectly led to choices to delay childbearing for some female professionals. In some countries workplace policies that offered short maternity leave were felt to be insufficient for women to be able to look after very young babies as they had to return to work.
The Emerging Voices also felt that different yardsticks were used to measure the behavior and performance of men and women in the workplace. It was felt that women were allowed to make fewer mistakes once they reached senior leadership positions and had to constantly justify their positions.
Gender stereotyping also came up as an issue. Stereotypes ranged from associations of beauty with incompetence, to negative attitudes towards women who choose to forego childbearing to focus on their career, or conversely those who choose to have children and then take maternity leave.
However, all is not bleak and challenging, there are more women getting higher degrees today (over 60% of college graduates in the US are women), and women are increasingly entering spaces previously reserved for men. Some of the “Emerging Voices” from India mentioned examples of women from socially and economically disadvantaged areas transforming the health indicators of entire villages.
There are obvious biological differences between men and women. Bearing children is something that only women can do. Keeping these differences in mind, can social structures evolve to support women so that having and raising children is something that women can do alongside professional responsibilities? Instead of placing the responsibility on a woman of choosing “the right man”—societal and structural solutions are necessary (equal pay for men and women, day-care facilities for young children in workplaces). Both men and women should be able to develop supportive social and professional systems that would allow families and individuals to give equal opportunities to both genders.
Authors:
- Radhika Arora, Public Health Foundation of India;
- Natalie Eggermont, Institute of Tropical Medicine, Antwerp;
- Fabienne Richard, Institute of Tropical Medicine, Antwerp;
- Ildikó Bokros, Institute of Tropical Medicine, Antwerp;
- Marsha Orgill, Health Economics Unit, University of Cape Town.
The authors are part of the “Emerging Voices for Global Health” programme of the Institute of Tropical Medicine, Antwerp, Belgium. Run concurrently and in collaboration with the Global Symposium on Health Systems Research, the programme provides training, mentoring, and networking opportunities for promising young health researchers and professionals from low and middle income countries. The views presented by the authors are solely hers and not of her affiliated institution.
Advertisements: Best and Worst Attempts to Sell Stuff to Women
We all have a love-hate relationships with ads on TV. OK, mostly hate. But every now and then (unlike Axe and most fragrance ads for example) they can be smart, non-sexist and funny.
Policymic collected some of the best and worst US ads of 2012 in which they are trying to sell stuff for women. I only include two examples here, but they have more.
One of the worst: you have probably heard about the pink “BIC for her” pens, which caused some turbulence on the internet and BIC was heavily attacked for being sexist (not without a reason). You may have also seen Ellen DeGeneres’s brilliant piece about it. (If not, watch it, it is hilarious!)
So here is the commercial of this new product for her:
Thankfully, there were good examples also, one of them being from Kotex, who gave a new twist to the usual tampon commercial
Why Women Still Can’t Have It All
Anne-Marie Slaughter is a professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton University, and the mother of two teenage boys. She served as the director of policy planning at the US State Department from 2009 to 2011. I have read her recent blogpost entitled Why Family Is a Foreign-Policy Issue on the Foreign Policy blog where she discusses that “if more women could juggle work and family successfully enough to allow them to remain on high-powered foreign-policy career tracks, more women would be available for top foreign-policy jobs. And that would change the world far more than you think, from giving peace talks a better chance to making us better able to mobilize international coalitions to reordering what issues governments even choose to work on.”
In this blogpost she refers to a longer essay that she wrote earlier this year to The Atlantic magazine on why, as the modified saying goes, “you can have it all; you just can’t have it all at once.” I have the feeling that what she says is still universal to most working women in many countries, and not only to those with such high-profile jobs. In her essay one of the people Slaughter quotes is Mary Matalin, who spent two years as an assistant to Bush and the counselor to Vice President Dick Cheney before stepping down to spend more time with her daughters: “Having control over your schedule is the only way that women who want to have a career and a family can make it work.” This, ultimately, affects all working mothers, and actually, should affect all working parents. (On that note, one of my male colleagues is changing jobs at the end of this year because he came to the conclusion that his present position requires so much traveling that it is not compatible with raising three small children if he wants to stay committed professionally.)
Slaughter’s essay might be a bit lengthy, but it is definitely worth to read if you are interested in how to combine work and private life. Two interesting quotes might be enough to lure you into reading on:
“To many men, however, the choice to spend more time with their children, instead of working long hours on issues that affect many lives, seems selfish. Male leaders are routinely praised for having sacrificed their personal life on the altar of public or corporate service. That sacrifice, of course, typically involves their family. Yet their children, too, are trained to value public service over private responsibility. At the diplomat Richard Holbrooke’s memorial service, one of his sons told the audience that when he was a child, his father was often gone, not around to teach him to throw a ball or to watch his games. But as he grew older, he said, he realized that Holbrooke’s absence was the price of saving people around the world—a price worth paying.”
“Ultimately, it is society that must change, coming to value choices to put family ahead of work just as much as those to put work ahead of family. If we really valued those choices, we would value the people who make them; if we valued the people who make them, we would do everything possible to hire and retain them; if we did everything possible to allow them to combine work and family equally over time, then the choices would get a lot easier.”
Street harassment – this time in NYC (and how they try to fight it)
According to the TEDx website, when feminist icon Gloria Steinem was asked, “What women today inspire you and make you feel that the movement continues?,” her response was, “Emily May of Hollaback!, who has empowered women in the street, literally.”
So who is Emily May and what is Hollaback!? Emily is an activist who (along with a couple of her friends) created Hollaback! in order to fight street harassment in the streets of New York City. Their aim is to empower the targets and make the harasser feel uncomfortable. In order to achieve this, they encourage people to use their smartphones to document, map, and share incidents of street harassment. Hollaback! is now present in 25 countries of the world, in more than a 60 cities.
Belgium to make sexism a criminal offence
A little follow up to my earlier post on new legislation that partially have been triggered by a video that features harassment on the streets of Brussels. Belgium’s Equal Opportunities Minister, Joëlle Milquet (Christian democrat), has unveiled plans to make sexism a criminal offence. As Flanders’ main news site, Deredactie writes: “She also wants sexism to be taken into consideration as an exacerbating circumstance when other crimes are being considered. The new bill speaks of “every gesture and utterance that is clearly intended to express contempt vis-à-vis one or more people of a different gender on the basis of their gender or that considers them to be inferior or reduces them to their sexual dimension and that constitutes a serious attack on their dignity”.
