EDI – NU Women

29th October 202129th October 2021

Annual Report 2021-22

Each year, NU Women compiles data from our events and initiatives as well as the results from our Annual Survey to assess the impact of the Network over the past year and consider changes we could make in the year ahead.

Some key findings from the report this year include:

The ability to access recordings of our events has been highly valued over the past year. This is something we will look to preserve as we move into a blended approach in the future, particularly as some members have expressed a desire to see the return of in-person events.
From our Annual Survey responses, the bi-monthly newsletter was the most valued activity organised by NU Women over the past year. Currently, the newsletter has over 1100 subscribers, and following the redesign in January 2021 we’re very pleased to hear that it’s well received.
Following this, the blog was cited as the second most valuable resource organised by NU Women this year. Based on other survey responses and feedback through other channels, this is because it is used as an accessible archive for our events where we post summaries and recordings.
Several survey respondents requested more networking and/or career oriented events in the coming academic year. Specifically, we will look to host women talking about their career paths, mixer events, and career mentoring.
These responses also echo a more general desire to see some more interactive or workshop-style events hosted by NU Women, with the understanding that some of these types of events are covid dependent.
Other activities organised by NU Women this year include: weekly writing groups; a zine collecting creative responses to working conditions during the pandemic; a film on the topic of women’s work at the University; and a charity glasses collection drive where we were able to donate over 400 pairs of glasses for Vision Aid Overseas.

Thank you to all our members for participating in NU Women, particularly through the challenges of 2020-21, and for your thoughtful responses as we look to improve our work in the future.

The report can be accessed in full below:

NUWomenAnnualReport2021-22 Download

25th September 201927th September 2019

Fighting Against Gendering Toys: Angela Wharrier

Self-professed lifelong feminist Angela Wharrier talks about the gender stereotyping of toys and what she did to fight it. Read on to find out what we can do to help children feel comfortable in pursuing a career free from gender stereotypes.

As a lifelong feminist and sociologist I have always been acutely aware of the socialisation of gender roles by the media and marketing campaigns, which reinforce the notion of a binary gender that assigns traits, behaviours and status to boys and girls as they grow up. This has always been especially true of toy marketing campaigns which have been shown to be particularly damaging to girls. The way children play and the messages they absorb regarding their gender, race, and economic class cannot be underestimated.

Women currently take up an overwhelming majority of roles in the caring, leisure, administrative and secretarial sectors whilst men dominate the managerial and skilled trades. This is evident in the UK Engineering workforce, of which only 9% are female. It is interesting to note the link between the gendering of these trades and the subtle stereotyping of the toys we play with when we’re young.

In 2013, I became incensed when walking around Fenwick’s toy department to see the toys signposted as Boys and Girls. Stereotypically, the active, aggressive, building toys were in the Boys section and the nurturing, housework and craft toys were in the Girls section. I wished to buy my niece some cars but had to look in the Boys section to find them – I wondered how it would make my niece (and any other child for that matter) feel to have to do that. This overt gender stereotyping and subtle integration into kids’ everyday lives via the toys they play with surely has an impact on children’s – girls in particular – choices and opportunities in education and employment.

I wrote to the manager of the toy department and expressed my views, referencing relevant sociological studies and citing the campaign that was influencing toy sellers throughout the UK: PinkStinks. The response, after some back and forth, was that they removed the gendered signs and put up signs simply stating the type of toy. I check each Christmas that the signage remains ungendered and so far, so good. Speaking out about this hopefully goes some way to encourage children to like whatever they fancy and play as they wish to play without worrying about whether they are acting oddly according to socially constructed barriers. I am hoping this will help young girls to be less constricted in their behaviour, feelings and ambitions and to consider all areas of learning so they assume that they can do any job in the world.

Editor’s note: The PinkStinks and Let Toys Be Toys campaigns are incredibly important in raising awareness of gender stereotypes and in fighting for gender equality. Of further interest, particularly related to Angela’s comments about the link between careers and gender roles, is Goldiblox. Fed up with how few females were enrolled on her undergraduate engineering degree, Goldiblox’s founder took matters into her own hands to “disrupt the pink aisle” in toy stores and “introduce girls to the joy of engineering at a young age”. It is perhaps initially sad to say that businesses like these are pioneering in their approach, but on the sunnier side of things, one more option to pique girls’ interest in STEM will never be one too many.

25th September 2019

Guest Blogger Deborah Husbands: Intersectionality Finally Comes of Age

We are delighted to present the next instalment of Gender + from guest blogger Deborah Husbands, Doctoral Researcher and Senior Lecturer in the Department of Psychology at the University of Westminster, London.

Intersectionality Finally Comes of Age

With glass in hand, I sit at my desk and reflect on a question posed recently by author and coach, Cherron Inko-Tariah, MBE: how can we bridge the diversity-inclusion gap? How can we, indeed? For a gap certainly exists. But let’s first unpack that word ‘diversity’ a little. Philosopher Nathaniel Coleman once said that diversity is a ‘dirty word’ that allows people to hide behind the real issues because it conveniently blurs the lines. Issues that lie deep within complexities from multiple identities in a fragmented world remain safely hidden under a diversity veil. But, there is fresh hope for clarity! Along comes a plethora of research at just the right time. Waving an ‘intersectionality’ banner, our attention is drawn to a new framework to dissect, particularise and understand these multiple identities. In other words, we are now equipped to bridge the gap. Yet, intersectionality is not new.

Intersectionality existed long before we were given the term in the late 1980s by feminist, critical race theorist and legal scholar, Kimberlé Crenshaw. In fact, it’s the way we have always experienced our life-worlds: as compartmentalised and disaggregated, as individualised and collectivistic, as unique and universal—all at the same time.

So, why has ‘intersectionality’ become so fashionable of late? Maybe, because it has divested itself of a ‘childish’ impulse for tunnel-vision and egocentrism characteristic of other frameworks. It has learnt to share its toys: new knowledge and ideas about the multiplicative (not additive) nature of identity. And, at last, it is dressed and ready for the ball, complete with an eclectic assortment of global escorts: gendered and racialised people, neglected feminists, structurally-dominated and politically-oppressed people. But what do we do with them all when they get there, asks the party-going newly-gentrified and socially-privileged among us? The answer, it seems, is that we research and study them to death as if they were, as Professor Gurnam Singh aptly puts it, the ‘exotic animal in the room’. And when we think we’ve ‘done enough’, we put them back into their compartmentalised world until a new social justice paradigm emerges that justifies taking them back out again. Only maybe, this time, using a different critical lens.

The world will likely be a much better place when diversity, inclusion and intersectionality go the way of the record player or tape recorder: as a vintage item that has long since served its purpose.

But until then, it seems we still have some work to do.

25th September 201925th September 2019

Gender and Race – Guest Blogger: Chi Onwurah MP

Our guest blogger, Chi Onwurah MP, Newcastle Central’s elected MP and Shadow Minister for Culture and the Digital Economy, discusses her embracement of the term ‘intersectionality’, her experiences as a black female Geordie of Irish and Nigerian decent, brought up on benefits on a council estate by a single, disabled mother, and her career progression from a woman in STEM to a woman in Parliament.

Image result for chi onwurah mp — Chi Onwurah MP

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