Diversity Day Events 2018
Diversity Day 15 November, 2018
15 November 2018 saw another Diversity Day event, this time focussing on human rights in the English language online sphere,
and more particularly on hate speech and ways of dealing with it. The presenters were Rita Divéki (Language Pedagogy PhD student and DELP colleague) and Laura Seben (final year BA in English student). They used their own materials as well as some activities from
a Council of Europe publication: "Bookmarks - A manual for combating hate speech online through human rights education". An initial activity about expressing views concerning the freedom of speech was followed by a presentation about types and features of hate speech as well as ways of combatting it. A group activity of classifying some instances of hate speech had the audience discuss the issue more in depth considering the content or tone of the statement, the intent of the person making it, the target audience that the statement is supposed to reach, the context of the utterance and the impact that the statement might have. The presentation was followed by a short discussion.
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Diversity Day 6 March, 2018
The event was convened by Cecilia Gall who was also the lead presenter. The session focussed on various aspects of gender (in)equality in work related situations and public perception. Following some spectacular statistics and images of women in different jobs around the world, we saw a recording of a TED Talk entitled "Are you biased? I am" by Kristen Pressner (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bq_xYSOZrgU), who made us realize that no matter how open-minded we think we are, we all have deeply ingrained bias. To see another aspect of this, the audience tried out The Harvard Implicit Bias Test, which is available at: http://www.implicit.harvard.edu/. (We took the Gender-Career test but there are many other topics, too.)
The following videos were concerned with the representation of females in children's stories (https://medium.com/@chandlerholland/the-ugly-truth-of-childrens-books-5af0a557fba4) and women's professional ambitions. This second talk was delivered by actress-producer-entrepreneur Reese Witherspoon. Continuing the topic of ambitious women, our student presenter, Laura Barsi talked about Jacinda Ardern (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ds8HGJlnKCQ), New Zealand's current (and third female) prime minister, who - besides all the congratulations - has recently been attacked and treated irrespectfully in the media for not being able to serve her country well as she is expecting her first child while in office (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-5293227/LIZ-JONES-pregnant-PM-betraying-voters.html, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IK9nBH2vBiQ). At the same time it was interesting to see two photos of the NZ government in 1981 and 2017 showing how all white male composition of cabinets has changed and the current government represents both genders and a variety of backgrounds. (N.B. Currently the Canadian government is the most diverse one.)
It is almost unbelievable in the 21st century that politicians in very responsible positions still believe they can display misogynist views. An example was shown from a session on the gender pay gap at the European Parliament in 2017, where Polish MEP Janusz Korwin-Mikke launched a sexist tirade against women and equal pay. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=40hhc0cjYyg) The gender pay gap is a very real problem even in the most developed countries. In the UK women earn 18% less than men. The last video of the event showed a playful attempt to raise the awareness of customers in a London pub of the gender pay gap by charging men 18% more.