International Women’s Day
Written by Sagal Arboshe
I’m one of three girls, and while we all have degrees, I’m the first to have a master’s degree (or at least, half of one so far). In my family this doesn’t feel especially radical as again, we’ve all been lucky enough to go to university and our parents are incredibly encouraging and proud of this fact. Similarly, on my — female dominated — course, being a woman and a postgraduate student feels like the norm rather than the exception. It’s important to recognise how significant it is that we’ve reached a point in time where you can be enrolled on a university degree programme in which you are not the minority as a woman. Illiteracy, domestic abuse and patriarchal struggles are coded into the female half of my family tree (my grandma famously defied my grandad’s wish to live in Saudi Arabia because of the lack of state education programmes for girls: “I’m not illiterate, so why should my daughters be?”) as they are in most families, if you go back far enough. This heritage makes me especially grateful to consider the opportunities I have had in accessing higher education (or any form of education really) in contrast to the position my mother, grandmother and great-grandmother would have been in at 21. Gratitude is not blindness and I am very aware of the multitude of access problems women, especially POC, face accessing higher education, both as students and as employees. The striking lecturer who stopped me on my walk through campus holding out a leaflet and saying “it’s about the gender pay gap, it affects you too” is evidence of this. International Women’s Day is an important opportunity to celebrate how far we have come in the fight for equality and to illuminate how far we must go to achieve it.
This semester I’m running a series of breakfast lectures around the topic of gender. It kicks off on Monday 16th March with a talk on Maternal Health in East Africa: Gender, Respectability and Professionalism. Find the details here!
