Gender Inequality and Women’s Rights Workshop

Name of the activity: Gender Inequality and Women’s Rights Workshop

Country/NMO: Turkey (TurkMSIC)

Program: Gender Based Violence

Contact information: [email protected]

Type of the activity: Capacity Building (Training or Workshop). Teaching and develop knowledge, skills and techniques in a particular field. While training can have any form, workshops are more formal and also include exchange of information between participants.

General description:

We organized a workshop named Social Gender Inequality and Women’s Rights at the week of 8 March International Women’s Day. In this workshop we aimed to touch upon serious problems which include gender inequality, sex role stereotypes, discrimination and alienation of LGBTI+ community and the role of Medicine students in solution of these problems. In this scope we invited expert and well-known names in these topics to our workshop and they did their presentations. Also, we organized a Queer Tango workshop in end of the activity for question the gender roles and stop alienation. In the end of the activity we contributed to medical students professional and non-professional point of view and increased their awareness on this subject.

Focus area:

Women and LGBTQIA+ Empowerment

Problem statement:

Our community still has quite big problems about gender inequality. Representation of women in economy is limited. The employment rate of women remained less than half of the employment rate of men in 2016 in Turkey, while the proportion of women in senior positions was 16.7 percent in the same year, according to recent data released by the Turkish Statistical Institute (TÜİK). Also women’s participation in politics is still low. Only 14 percent of Turkish Parliament members are women.

Target groups:

Medical students

Beneficiaries:

General population, Medical students, Women, LGBTQIA+ community

Objectives and indicators of success:

Our main objective is increase awareness about gender inequality and discrimination in our society. Besides we highlighted harmful effects of discrimination on society’s dynamics. Also, we aimed to give information about feminism, women’s movement, LGBT community and other concepts on this topic. We created different methods to evaluate our objectives. Our first method is collect people’s ideas before and after the activity and measure how they changed. So, we can see how our activity changed thoughts on this subject and how will it reflect on their behaviors in the future. The main goal of this methods is indicate that our activity are we able to change public opinion. In another indicator we looked that are we able to increase the responsibility which people feel about this subject.

Methodology:

Before the activity we searched for expert names who can help us for achieve our goals. We invited them to our activity day. They did presentations in an interactive way and answered our questions. Also we organized completely interactive lessons with sketches that can everyone who willing can act and discussions that everybody can say their thoughts and arguments. We especially chose well-known and expert speakers so we reached high participation number. We organized stands and distributed brochures about different topics. Also, we organized Queer Tango workshop with Faysal Tekoğlu, with this different and unforgettable experience we questioned gender roles. And we provided an easy and accessible channel between these names and participants in every means.

Plans for evaluation:

We created feedback mechanisms that works both during and after the activity so we could easily check our indicators to question success of our goals. During the activity in discussions we saw that people’s ideas changed in a positive and more sensitive way, their knowledge on this subject took progress noticeably. They expressed that they found answers for question marks in their minds. Also we created a feedback google form which asking how your opinions changed after the activity and what are you thinking for every session. In answers nearly all of our participants gave very positive feedbacks that saying this activity is changed their opinions about gender roles, discriminations to women and LGBT community and they will change and care for their behaviors after activity. So we can be able to increase awareness about inequality in our society and we achieved our goals in every way.