Last Sunday, Advocates for Women of the World (AWOW), Buck-I-Serv and the Student Life Multicultural Center together hosted the first annual Global Women’s Empowerment Conference at Ohio State. As a member of AWOW and Her Campus who always wants to do more and learn more about feminism and women’s rights, I decided to attended the conference.
Dr. Gisell Jeter-Bennett gave a wonderful speech to kick-off the conference. She said when we think about women’s rights problems, we can use the idea behind the slogan “Double V campaign,” which stood for two victories in democracy for black Americans during World War II: a victory at home and a victory abroad.
After the speech, we broke out into different sessions to discuss different topics. The first session I attended was about sexual harassment awareness. The leaders of this session were Taylor Albright and Sara Wendel. Taylor Albright is the leader of the Sexual Assault Awareness Committee in AWOW (I am in this committee too).
The discussion focused on sexual violence, particularly intimate partner sexual violence. The sad truth is, “Global estimates published by WHO indicate that about 1 in 3 (35%) of women worldwide have experienced either physical and/or sexual intimate partner violence or non-partner sexual violence in their lifetime.”
I am from China, and the situation in China is not very good. Even today, many Chinese women (and men) don’t treat this as sexual assault. In their mind, boyfriends or husbands can do whatever they want to their the other half because they’re in relationships or marriage. They think women should be obedient to their other half. This idea is sad and totally wrong.
We then had a really good conversation about how to spread awareness globally while still being sensitive to the culture of a particular country. A girl from the Undergraduate Business Women’s Association expressed her idea that education is really important. She said, “We can teach sexual violence definitions to people who are interested in starting a grassroots movement in their country.”
The second session I attended was Girls’ Education. In this session, we first had a speaker, Dr. Irving, talk about how she is working to teach young professionals in STEM how to teach in an interesting and engaging way. We shared our opinions about the importance of having more women in STEM next.
As a math major, I think this is an important topic. Nowadays, only 24% of STEM workers are women. This brings up problems including negative environments, sexual harassment, bias and unequal earnings. When we were asked about our opinion on why there should be more women in STEM, I said, “It can tell young girls that they can succeed in STEM field. Many people, including many young girls themselves, still believe that STEM is ‘unfeminine’ and it belongs to men. We need to show them that women can be successful in the STEM field.” She said the best way to change this situation is being a good role model yourself.
The last session talked about a new topic for me—Fair Trade. To be honest, before this conference, I didn’t know what fair trade was. Basically, fair trade is being able to pay workers fair wages even when they are living in developing countries where they are often taken advantage of. The speaker talked about 10 principles of fair trade. Here is an article I found online that explains fair trade: https://wfto.com/fair-trade/10-principles-fair-trade
I think this conference was really successful. I learned a lot about things I didn’t know before, and I learned others’ opinions about things I already knew. I hope more people who care or want to know more about women’s rights will attend the conference next year.
Conference photos credited to Karla Haddad, AWOW member