Sustainable Development Goal No5 : Gender Equality
We Are One : Our journey
This year on Miss Betty Tsakarestou’s Social Issues, Social Innovation and Corporate Responsibility courses we had to choose 1 of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals from the United Nations and look into how it could be implemented into a real-life corporation. According to the United Nations website, the Sustainable Development Goals are a universal call to action to end poverty, protect the planet and improve the lives and prospects of everyone, everywhere by 2030. Even though we have come a long way towards achieving these goals, we’ve still got a lot of work to do. In order to accomplish the goals, we had to create teams and select a goal that concerned us enough to be put into action. Therefore, we studied all the goals as a team and picked one of them.
Our team consists of three girls, Eleni Bakoula, Lefki- Maria Konstantinidou and Dora Kopsafti and we chose the goal number 5 that concerns gender equality and the empowerment of all women and girls. In our everyday lives, we are witnesses of cases of sexism, such as catcalling, harassment, the glass ceiling in working and athletic environments and inequality in wages. We chose this goal because we believe that gender equality is necessary for a peaceful world. We live in 2020 and there are still women and girls that don’t have access to health care, education and jobs that they wish to do. In some countries, women are forced to marry since their childhood. There’s big pressure on women to fit certain standards, especially when it comes to weight and body image. These standards insist on all women having to wear zero number on clothes and them having to eat a limited amount of food.
We observed all these issues and we thought that we had to inform our classmates and other people in our target group about this significant problem, so we created a social start-up with which we wanted to show that we are all united regardless of gender. Our first step was to create a questionnaire and share it with our fellow students in order to see how they would respond to our idea and for us to see what our target group would think of this plan becoming true. We had 20 answers to our questionnaire and all the answers were very positive. We will let you know about the answers to the most important questions that helped us to continue our project.
In the question “From a scale of 1 to 5, how interested are you in sexism issues?” 80% responded with “5”. This means that many young people recognize the problem of gender inequality and want to fight for it. We had 100% affirmative answers in the question “Would you be interested in attending seminars that discuss sexism and bring awareness on the topic?” and we had 95% affirmative answers in the question “Would you be comfortable with personal stories of sexual harassment or assault being shared during those seminars, or even you sharing your own story?”. These responses are proof of the great need to create groups of people in our audience in collaboration with experts that can all share and discuss their own stories, as well as to seek advice from the experts to boost their own self-confidence. However, apart from the questionnaire, we decided to interview two people in order to understand in depth what we should do through our social start-up.
The names of the interviewers remain anonymous, but here are a few words from what they said to us. The first interviewer told us about cases of harassment that they had heard from their friends. More specifically, they said: “A friend of mine has confessed to me that her boss constantly made inappropriate insults and moves on her while she was working. When she would wear something that was more well-fitted, like leggings, he would make a comment about it, although he was married and even when his wife was present. Another acquaintance of mine has told me that her boyfriend didn’t respect her privacy and showed her private photos to his friends. It saddens me that nowadays men treat women this way, as if they’re objects and don’t respect their privacy and the concept of equality.” The second interviewee spoke to us about women and girls that succeed, having their voice heard and being brave publicly such as Malala and Greta, cause as they said: “It’s 2020 and society is ready for women to take leadership.” Both interviewees agreed that education is the most important key to building equality. The first interviewee said about education: “Our education system must build the right foundation on equality, let the students know that everyone is equal, that society should give all people regardless of their gender the same opportunities and treat people the same. Harassing behaviors such as cat-calling must stop, because they make women feel uncomfortable and afraid. Boys must learn that they should respect girls since a young age, and that they should treat them as equals, not as sexual objects. Real men are feminists.”. Τhe conclusion from these two interviews is that silence does not help and is not the solution to this great problem of gender inequality that plagues our society. Τhe only way to solve this problem is to discuss and act on it.
Based on both our online survey and our interview’s results, we concluded that the issues we had in mind were real and highly concerned most of our interviewees, as well as that there was a necessity to build a foundation like the one we were inspired to start. Our interviewees also didn’t neglect to mention the importance of social media nowadays and that they could act as a helpful tool for education on the younger generations, which was a key step to building our foundation. Furthermore, the feedback we got both from the Instagram questions we will be looking at later on and the response of the school we got in touch with was very positive and displayed a great interest towards our goal.
Therefore, we decided to create a Social Start-Up which is based in Athens and is called We Are One. Our company aims towards organizing weekly sessions and seminars that will have four main goals:
Firstly, we will be making efforts into boosting women’s confidence. This can be achieved through motivational speeches or simply being in a place with other women that can understand your struggles, so that you can all get through them together. Also contributing to our first goal, we will have some women, that feel comfortable sharing their stories about sexual harassment they might have faced, share those stories, so that they can empower other women and they can all try to learn to stand up for themselves. Thirdly, we will invite men to our seminars and sessions, in order to raise awareness and encourage them into helping. We believe informing men will be a huge step into making the situation our society is in, better, since they’re often the reason many women feel like they’re in danger or have suffered through sexism, even when, sometimes, men are unaware of how their actions can affect women. All genders working together can make a grand change. Last but not least, we will motivate working women to take on bigger roles in their companies and try to break the glass ceiling together. To conclude, for the first round of our seminars, we will be targeting:
1) Women who wish to attend this type of seminars
2) Women who wish to speak up about their experiences
3) Men and people of all genders who wish to help
4) Working women who wish to gain more confidence in their working environment.
Moreover, in our seminars, we will invite health experts and provide solutions on unhealthy body standards that are forced upon women by the society. We will also be organizing school workshops, since we believe it’s very important for children to learn about these topics from a young age. This way, they will grow up knowing about the importance of gender equality and be raised having healthy views, opposed to the way they are grown nowadays. These days, some may even keep an unhealthy mindset until they grow old. We believe many inequality issues can be prevented this way, through awareness, especially when it’s from a young age. Workshops are also a great way to learn, especially for children and teenagers, since it spikes up their interest, and learning something in practice always attaches it better in your memory. Lastly, our organization will produce advertisements created to raise awareness on harassment and sensitize the public eye.
We did a research in order to find similar organizations, which are our competitors but also co-workers in completing this important goal, and find how we differentiate ourselves from them and what we can offer to the public, so that we can be of significant help. One organization we found is HeForShe, which also played as an inspiration for us to follow this goal and create our Start-Up. However, it’s very easy to find a difference to HeForShe. HeForShe is a very well established global organization that continues to contribute greatly to achieving gender equality and defeating sexism. And while their actions are of immense importance, what makes our company different is that our activities and base are in Athens, Greece, and for the moment we will continue to try to make a difference locally, taking small steps as we begin our journey.
Another similar organization is Diotima, which is a Greek company that takes serious action into trying to make Greece a better place for all of us and spread awareness on sexism and several other major social issues. Diotima is also a highly inspirational company that helps spread the word and defeat the stigma of sexism, this time locally. This is the reason why it is harder for us to differentiate our actions from this company. Firstly, Diotima is an NGO, which makes it different from our company being a Start-Up. It’s apparent that the way we operate will be very different. Also, our organization, as mentioned before, is a Social Start-Up. The “Social” title was given due to our actions. Specifically, due to the way our company uses social media in order to spread and has chosen to collaborate with influencers. Therefore, our organization is up to date and can target the younger generation, a target group of great interest towards achieving our goal. Also, it matches the image of its founders, since we are also young people highly connected online and operating through social media. We will further analyze our social media presence later on, describing our marketing techniques. What also differentiates our company and displays our focus towards the younger generations is that we also organize seminars at schools to prevent these issues from growing, since children are going to be aware of them from a young age, as mentioned before.
We have already made a step forward into this direction, since we have contacted the headmaster of a junior high school in Kallithea and provided him with guidelines for our seminars, and he was positive about the idea. We believe it is a good call to target a junior high school, since we aim towards younger students, but not too young to grasp these concepts and to have had some sort of experience concerning them. Furthermore, this specific school has already hosted many seminars and collaborated with students, which we see as a positive sign towards achieving our goal. The feedback we were given was crucial, since he was positive to help us organize the seminars’ dates and also added his input on the seminars mentioning gender identity matters. This, of course, is only an initial step towards bringing our idea to life, but we ought to take many more. Therefore, besides our questionnaire, personalized interviews and contacting this school, we will later on be reviewing another way in which we’ve tested how our mission would work and take a step further to becoming real life, and how people would react to it.
Moving on to our marketing techniques for our startup: We Are One, we aimed to further bring awareness on these topics and project our idea and cause. It is known that we live in a world where social media play a vital role in our lives and have become in our days a great source of information, knowledge and entertainment. We have taken advantage of social media in our marketing by creating an Instagram profile for our startup in order to reach our audience and build a closer relationship with it. Moreover, our target group utilizes them on a daily basis, thus; the media are a great platform to share our ideas and actions and encourage people to join We Are One.
In addition, we decided to collaborate with influencers with and without sponsored content. We wished to work with people that have a large platform that they can take advantage of, in order to familiarize our startup with the public. Moreover, we focused on collaborating with influencers that have an audience similar to the one we want to reach as well as content wise and are sensitized on such serious matters like sexism and gender equality. Implementing influencers to our journey is a way to bring more attention to these subjects and a more effective way to influence the public opinion since people have shown to value greatly when an influencer they respect and admire voices their opinion. They will post at their public accounts on platforms like Instagram and Facebook, specialized content that will inform their followers on our startup’s seminars and workshops and how they can participate. Moreover, we have set as a future goal, as our startup continues to grow and evolve, to collaborate and work with companies that are interested on what we do and wish to spread awareness on the topic of sexism that occurs every day in many work environments. Women have sadly faced multiple forms of workplace discrimination like the gender wage gap and also the longer time needed for them to advance in careers and take on significant tasks and leadership positions. Women have also been victims of a more subtle form of sexism that involves seemingly harmless and playful jokes and a different treatment that is sometimes based purely on their gender. These are some of the issues we wish to eliminate and for that we will aim to have men and women employees engage in our seminars, so that they can inform and further analyze to the participants such serious issues through their working experience and also how everyone can contribute in order to make the workplace an environment with equal opportunities and also reduce the phenomenon of gender discrimination.
Next, we thought about utilizing the possibilities of Instagram and how we can effectively use its properties, so our participants and potential clients can talk directly to us through this platform no matter the distance and their location. Our startup will have a registered experienced psychologist that will answer anonymously people’s concerns and questions that they can submit weekly through Instagram stories. We also took this initiative and tested it from a conjecture perspective to a real time initiative and observed that people were intrigued and excited by our action and were eager to participate. Some of the questions they submitted were how can they avoid someone who is bothering them in the streets as well as more general questions like how they can apply to volunteer for our startup and participate to our seminars. The interest that people showed in our Q&A feature really made us realize that a lot of people wanted to learn more about joining our startup and also the fact that we can assist the public on topics that people are aware of but often feel afraid or embarrassed to talk about, and are not educated enough. Moreover, we created an official website that people will be able to browse and get information on our startup and learn more about our mindset and goals as well as take a glance of our seminars and workshops. They can also fill in an online form if they wish to become a member of We Are One and find out our upcoming scheduled events and our contact information.
To conclude, as a team we were immediately intrigued and wanted to select the fifth sustainable development goal that concerned gender equality which is a topic that we feel passionate about and wanted to learn more and explore its aspects as well as making an impact. Even though our society has progressed significantly it is a fact that numerous women and girls have been victims of verbal, physical and sexual violence and harassment as well as domestic violence and other harmful practices that still occur in developing countries. Eliminating the discrimination that women have faced and the large inequalities, that still continue to exist and thrive in certain regions of the world, is not just a human right but a path that has been proven to lead to economic growth. The private sector also ought to adapt policies and implement initiatives in order to ameliorate women’s empowerment in the workplace. Providing women an equal access to education, health care, and a fair representation in leading roles will benefit our societies and make our world a better place. This goal is also really important to us because as women we ought to be more educated on these issues that involves us and, in some cases, we can identify ourselves. We developed our cooperative and presentative abilities throughout the duration of this course and tested how the initial plan in our minds slowly could become a reality by implementing it into real life circumstances and viewing the results. The journey of working on this goal and evolve our startup while prototyping for a real-world solution was for us an essential lesson, not only as a knowledge tool for our future career paths but also for our lives as human beings.
Our Powerpoint Presentation:
Our Instagram profile:
Link: https://www.instagram.com/weare_one_su/
Our Website:
Professor: Betty Tsakarestou
Team: Eleni Bakoula, Dora Kopsafti
