Agile india women_war_peace_rae_abileah
•Download as PPTX, PDF•
1 like•1,214 views
This document discusses issues facing women globally and provides suggestions for empowering women. It notes that 1 in 3 women will be raped or beaten in her lifetime, affecting over 1 billion women worldwide. Several quotes illustrate the dangers women face and how violence against women is used to instill fear. The document then discusses the underrepresentation and pay disparities women face in the workforce. It concludes by offering suggestions for creating a more positive and supportive workplace culture for women, such as implementing mentorship programs, increasing women's representation, and supporting girls' coding initiatives.
More Related Content
Viewers also liked
Viewers also liked (15)
Similar to Agile india women_war_peace_rae_abileah
Similar to Agile india women_war_peace_rae_abileah (13)
Agile india women_war_peace_rae_abileah
- 3. 1 in 3 women will be raped or beaten in her lifetime. That’s one billion women on the planet right now.
- 7. Women in the Workforce: • Women do 2/3 labor but own less than 1/3 assets • Women are paid less than men for the same work • Women are 13% of the boards of directors at high-tech Fortune 500 companies
- 8. 1 in 3 women will be raped or beaten in her lifetime. That’s one billion women on the planet right now.
- 9. How is this possible in the 21st century?
- 29. “It is now more dangerous to be a woman than to be a soldier in modern conflict.” — US Maj. Gen. Patrick Cammaert, 2008
- 39. “If you destroy women, you destroy the Congo. Raping women is the cheapest and most effective way to instill fear in and humiliate a community. It doesn't even cost a bullet.” – Eve Ensler
- 43. So what can you do?
- 50. “Anyone driven away from expressing innovation or writing excellent code is a loss to all of us, however unoffended we think they should be.” – Martin Fowler
- 51. Ways to Empower Women in the Workplace: • • • • • Positive workplace culture Communication Healthy work-life balance Mentorship Value diversity over tokenizing & stereotyping • Hire more women • Start a women’s empowerment initiative like WiLD, IWD, Ada Lovelace Day • Support Girls who tech (Black Girls Code, Rails, etc.)
- 61. Face it: You can’t eat your computer.
- 63. Preserving indigenous wisdom and embracing ecological solutions: India’s Barefoot College
- 69. “Our lives begin and end the day we become silent about things that matter.” – Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
- 76. Organizing looks a lot like Agile.
- 77. Agile Manifesto Values: 1. Individuals and interactions over processes and tools 2. Working Software over comprehensive documentation 3. Customer collaboration over contract negotiation 4. Responding to change over following a plan
- 87. What do these women have in common?
- 92. Ideas? Thoughts? Let’s talk … Rae Abileah @raeabileah rae@raeabileah.com San Francisco, CA USA
Editor's Notes
- Conference Talk Description: One in three women will be raped or beaten in her lifetime. Half of the seven billion global population are women so that means one billion women alive now will, or have been, beaten or raped or beaten. Women and children are disproportionately affected by war and occupation as well. And yet numerous studies illustrate how uplifting women's work and leadership can strengthen the whole society and economy. Women are at the forefront of global campaigns challenging militarism and violence, and working to redirect resources into health care, education, green jobs and other life-affirming activities. What can we learn from these women and their successes thus far? How can the technology sector support this crucial work? How do these social movements stay agile to rapidly respond to breaking news while building a long-term progressive movements for deeper social, economic and environmental justice? As Arundhati Roy said, "Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing." In this talk, Rae Abileah will share visionary examples of women-led work for peace and justice and explore the paradigm shift needed for equality, human rights, and justice for all.
- See the video online here:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gl2AO-7Vlzk One Billion Rising campaign video,www.onebillionrising.org
- One in three women will be raped or beaten in her lifetime. Half of the seven billion global population are women So One billion women will be raped in their lifetimes on this planet right now. Every 2 minutes in the US a woman is sexually assaulted.The World Bank tells us that Women aged 15-44 are more at risk from rape and domestic violence than from cancer, car accidents, war and malaria.
- 16 year old Imrana burned in her home, 20 year old Manju Singh beheaded by her father, from Punjab to Basra, thousands of women and girls stoned, beaten, and buried alive each year. We should call “Honour Killings” what they really are: Dishonorable Killings, murders.
- 4 million women and girls are trafficked annually.That means people being bought and sold for sex across borders.
- At the peak of the American colonial slave trade in the 1780s: there were about 80,000 slaves transported from Africa to the New World. Now, the US State Department tells us there are about 800,000 women that are trafficked across International borders. A slave in the 1780s was worth about $40,000USD in today's money. Now you can buy a girl trafficked for a few hundred dollars.Aren’t women worth more than $300?* From CNN and The Slave Next Door by Kevin Bales
- Women do 2/3 of world’s labor but they own less than 1/3 of the world’s assetsWomen are paid less than men for same workThe odds of being in a high-level technical position are almost three times greater for men than for women.Women make up only about 25% of U.S. computer and math jobs.Women are only 13 percent of the boards of directors at high-tech Fortune 500 companies.Around the world, women are constantly threatened by exploitation, violence and abuse.
- A little more than one year ago, the brave and courageous survivor of the Delhi gang rape breathed her last. I want to dedicate this talk to her and other victims and survivors of violence against women.Rape cases and cases of violence against women are on the rise. The Indian National Crime Records Bureau tells us that rape cases jumped an astronomical increase of 873% from 1971 when they first started to record cases of rape in India. And of course many more rapes are never reported or documented. Delhi has emerged as the rape capital of India, accounting for 25% of the cases. Just this past weekend, a 21 year old woman from Assam was gang-raped in Delhi and a 55 year old woman was raped on her way to go shopping in broad daylight.Let me say this statistic again:1 in 3 Women You Love will be Raped or beaten in her lifetime.Your Daughter. Your Sister. Your Mother. Your Wife. 1 - in - 3 raped or beatenThat's ONE BILLION WOMEN on this planet right now.
- How is it possible that this barbaric treatment of women can coexist in the same millennia of highly sophisticated progress that is bringing us the internet, 3D printers, tremendous life saving medical discoveries, and space exploration toward Mars? Is it enough that a handful of women can prove themselves in a male-dominated world and become CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, like Sheryl Sandberg, or are these outliers not reason enough for celebration given the plight of masses of women around the world? And what would it look like for a woman to be successful in business without losing the feminine characteristics which are so integral for conflict resolution, societal harmony, and the health of any company or community? And maybe first and foremost, what am I - a community organizer, or maybe more accurately, a rebel rouser, doing at a conference full of tech professionals with all of you? I think maybe the conference organizers thought, well heck this conference will take a lot of e-mails, e-readers, why not add a talk about e-quality?
- This topic might seem like an odd choice given a conference agenda that features sessions on Polyglot Programming, LEGO Play, and Frontend Javascript using AngularJS, Jasmine, Karma & Jenkins but I want to make a case that maybe the people that brought me to the stage really do know what they are doing. :)
- “Violence against women is as old as patriarchy. Traditional patriarchy has structured our world-views and mindsets, our social and cultural worlds on the basis of domination over women, and the denial of their full humanity and right to equality.” (Dr. Shiva) In many ways the past fifty years have seen a watershed movement for women’s rights that has had many successes. I'm empowered to speak out and stand before you today because of the frontlines hard work of generations of women - and men - before me who stood up against this harsh treatment of women. And here I want to give a shout out to my mom who taught me that being a feminist is beautiful! Even with all the recent successes, violence against women has intensified in recent years, taking on more brutal forms like the murder of the Delhi gang rape victim, “Nirbhaya”, the fearless one, as she has been called by the public.
- The issue of women's rights is not a luxury, or a frivolous concern left to those without jobs, who have the time or energy to be activists, no, the well being of women around the planet is everyone's concern because our own well being depends on each other. And because it actually makes sense, as in dollars and sense, to care about gender equality.
- So, why do I care?Let me tell you a bit of my own personal story. I was born on Election Day. I guess that meant I was destined to be either a politician or a protester? Here’s a pic of me with my first best friend Vikash doing one of our favorite things - slogging through puddles! I am the first generation American daughter of two immigrant parents. My mother’s family is from Holland, and my father was born in what is now Israel. In his teens my father managed to immigrate to the US, where, at around 18 years old he met my mom. They got married and moved to California - the land of promise, and of technology.
- Yep my dad is a computer scientist who worked on the Illiac 4 and other now-ancient computer processing giants that were birthed in Silicon Valley.
- When my dad wasn’t at work, he could usually be found at home drinking and shouting at my mother. I grew up in a house of broken glass broken promises and broken bones. I didn’t know that real love doesn’t have to hurt or cause panic attacks, late night fighting matches, near-death experiences. But I did have a good idea that what I was witnessing wasn’t right. From the outside our family looked normal, even highly successful. We were the American Dream -- the immigrant family who rose from rags to middle class wealth living in the seaside suburbs. I was an honor roll student and star athlete. And we had the newest Ford sedan. From the inside, everything was crumbling and breaking apart. After years of violent attacks, my mom finally got the courage to leave my father, and try to make it on her own as a single, working mother. In high school I founded a program to educate teens about domestic abuse and alcoholism. I figured there was no way to make a dent in the global epidemic of violence, but if I could just help one girl, my suffering would not be for nothing. But then in college I started thinking, maybe I can do something about this globally. I started looking into my family history to find out how things got so bad.
- My grandparents were survivors of WWII. My mom’s mom was in hiding in the basement of her Dutch home which the Nazis confiscated, and her family lost everything in the war. Those in my dad’s family, all Jews, that didn’t immigrate to Palestine at the turn of the century, were killed in the war. Of course we each have to take responsibility for our actions, but we also have ask how cycles of violence happen. In my own family, I began to piece together the devastating impacts of war on family life.
- I mean, how can soldiers and whole countries be violent toward a perceived enemy, and not have some of that violence trickle back home, seeping into family life? How can nations promote abuse, torture, and murder of the “enemy”, popularize violent video games, and glorify violence on TV and then suggest peaceful conflict mediation in interpersonal circumstances? So when 9/11 happened in 2001 and I was in my second year of college, I had to act to oppose an attack on Afghanistan. An eye for an eye and the whole world goes blind, right?
- In New York and Washington, DC, we marched, rallied, protested, along with the whole world, but we couldn’t keep the US from invading Afghanistan and then Iraq. So it was that I took up a job after graduation with a women’s peace organization, CODEPINK. www.codepink.org
- Over the past ten years I’ve worked with this organization to create creative campaigns that bring women’s voices for justice to the forefront of politicians, the public, and the media.
- At CODEPINK we... coordinated marches and rallies
- got everyday people from moms to military women out in the streets
- coordinated humanitarian aid campaigns delivering thousands of dollars of medicines and needed supplies to women in Iraq, Gaza, and Afghanistan* Pictured here: Humanitarian delegation to Pakistan to say no to drone warfare; Walk in Their Shoes visual art memorial for killed Iraqi civilians; first CODEPINK delegation to Iraq to say no to war
- staged protests inside government offices to expose the elephant in the room... CODEPINK activist Desiree Fairooz to Condi Rice: The blood of Iraqi children is on your hands!
- working to decrease the enormous bloated US military budget http://www.codepink.org/section.php?id=429http://www.bringourwardollarshome.org/https://twitter.com/wardollarshome
- target and in some cases boycott corporations that make violent weapons (HP makes scanners to ID Palestinians at segregated checkpoints in the Occupied West Bank) More on HP’s tech used to enforce a violent and illegal occupation:http://www.globalexchange.org/economicactivism/campaigns/hpHP is a global provider of computer products, including PCs, printers, servers, software, and IT services and solutions. In the United States, HP is one of the top 25 defense contractors with the Pentagon/U.S. Department of Defense. HP also provides products and services to the Department of Homeland Security for enhanced immigration status checks. HP provides on-going support and maintenance to a biometric ID system installed in Israeli checkpoints in the occupied West Bank which deprive Palestinians of the freedom of movement in their own land and allows the Israeli military occupation to grant or deny special privileges to the civilians under its control. HP is also working with the Israeli government to manufacture and distribute a biometric ID system for all Israeli citizens, which categorizes citizens by their ethnic background and serves to discriminate against Arab citizens.
- we connect the dots between the economic crash and what was devastating women at home in the US: Big banks foreclosing on homes. We asked why our government always has enough money to buy the latest weapon and bailout the biggest corporations, but can’t provide basic services like healthcare and quality education to the people. www.womenoccupy.org
- Speaking tours with women like MalalaiJoyato highlight women’s voices from the frontlines of warMalalaiJoya, elected to the Afghan government, fearlessly speaks out against the US occupation
- highlighting how women’s rights have not significantly improved under occupation
- And why are women’s voices, like Malalai’s, so crucial to peacebuilding? Well let’s look at the facts: In any war today most of the victims are civilians, those least empowered aka women and children suffer most. they are collateral damage.Women and girls are targeted as a tactic of war to humiliate, dominate, instill fear in, and punish members of a community or ethnic group.Sexual violence exacerbates conflict and perpetuates insecurity in the wake of war. It holds entire communities hostage.While women have a legal right under international law to be protected from sexual violence, even in the midst of war, sexual violence has been the “least condemned war crime.”So maybe it’s not a surprise that overwhelmingly women run pacifist movements in countries at war. This isn't just because the men are off fighting, or because women take up arms in fewer numbers than men. War makes an "Other" of the enemy and maybe women have more compassion for the Other having been Othered so much in our own societies. Philosopher RadaIvekovic says that: Traditionally women adapt to different cultures more easily, giving up their family names and their origins more often than men when marrying into another community, and are socialized into accepting the Other - this is learned behavior that anyone can learn. Or to put it another way, American author and team leadership trainer Starhawk: “Women have been the guardians of life-not because we are better or purer or more innately nurturing than men, but because the men have busied themselves making war. Because of our responsibility to the next generation, because of our own love for our families and communities and this country that we are a part of, we understand the love of a mother in Iraq for her children, and the driving desire of that child for life.”http://codepink.org/article.php?list=type&type=3 Women may be vocal in the streets, but are left out of the peace negotiating table.
- Out of 300 peace agreements since the end of the Cold War, only 18 have addressed sexual violence. Why? Maybe it’s because the dominant gender defines the "interests" of war and later, of peace -- these negotiations are done by the warlords themselves. No women have been appointed Chief or Lead peace mediators in UN-sponsored peace talks.Fewer than 3 percent of signatories to peace agreements are women.http://www.womenwarpeace.org/
- Here’s a recent example of the push for women at the peacemaking table: After three years of horrendous fighting, a death toll now exceeding 100,000 and more than seven million Syrians forced to leave their homes, Syrian peace talks took place in Switzerland last month. CODEPINK and a coalition of women's groups launched Women Lead to Peace, a global alliance of women and male allies calling for an immediate ceasefire in Syria, an embargo on arms sales, greater humanitarian aid for the refugees and displaced, and the full participation of women at the peace negotiations. http://codepink.org/article.php?id=6546
- WOMEN AND EARTH AND ECONOMYWomen aren’t only victims of violent armed conflicts and physical assault. Women are also under violent attack in the economic wars on food, the environment, and natural resources. It’s these wars that I came to India two months ago to study. I took a course at the Earth University in Dehradun with Dr. Vandana Shiva, who explains how our current economic system is violence on women.
- In this current global economic system, a woman’s kitchen garden and homemade clothing for her children aren’t valued at all since she isn’t selling anything outside the home. But isn’t this work the bread and butter of life? A living forest doesn’t contribute to GDP but when trees are cut down and sold as timber there is growth.
- Public tap water shared freely does not create economic growth. But when Coca-Cola sets up a plant, mines water, and fills plastic bottles with it, the economy grows. This is all growth based on creating poverty - poverty for nature and for local communities, in which women are impacted greatly. Thanks to Coke’s bottled water plant, local women are now forced to walk longer distances to look for safe drinking water. - Source Vandana Shiva
- “In the village of Plachimada in Kerala, Coca Cola created a bottled water plant that sucked the local wells dry. When the walk for water became over 10 kilometers, local tribal woman Mayilamma said enough is enough. We can’t walk further, the Coca-Cola plant must shut down. The movement that the women started eventually led to the closure of the plant.”
- If economics is based on limitless growth in the confines of a limited world then the powerful must grab all the resources from the vulnerable. This creates a culture of rape -- the rape of the earth, the rape of mountain tops to extract coal, of aquifers in order to frack natural gas, of acres of jungle in order to create more land for factory farming.
- And the rape of the earth and the rape of women are inextricably linked, metaphorically in shaping our worldview, but also in our material reality of everyday life. We can look at the case of women in the Congo…
- The Congo is the poorest country on earth, by GDP, and yet one of the richest in terms of resources. Since colonialism, when the King of Belgium ran a notoriously genocidal regime in order to plunder Congo's rubber, armies have tried to grab its wealth. Today's gold rush is over coltan – Congo has 80% of Africa's reserves of the mineral, which is used in mobile phones, laptops, iPads. With the resource in such demand, there's a direct link between the technology consumer boom and the fighting in Congo. Rape is a key feature of this war and it is undermining Congolese society. An average of 40 women and girls are being raped every day in South Kivu, DRC. It is estimated that more than half a million women and children have been raped over more than a decade of the country’s conflict.After being raped a woman is usually excluded by her family and so, when women are the ones having the babies and doing all the cooking and farming, the whole community is quickly undermined. The particularly violent way of rape that has become the norm in the Congo destroys the women's reproductive organs. They can no longer have children. Society breaks down. If you destroy enough wombs, there will be no children. So then you come right in and take the minerals. Playwright Eve Ensler says: "There is so much rape in men who've been colonized and enslaved. You have to wonder what it's done to these men, to their collective psychological memory. Centuries of colonialism, slavery and exploitation by the west have come together and are now being delivered on the bodies of the Congolese, most dramatically on the bodies of women. Sources: The Guardian, and cityofjoy.org
- In the midst of the atrocities, Congolese women have been organizing from occupying the US embassy in Kinshasa to mobilizing across the nation to stop the war. Eve Ensler and local Congolese partners got together to create City of Joy: a living, breathing recovery community, hospital, and training center for women survivors of rape and trauma. City of Joy is the product of a shared vision that the women don't just need help, they need power. Their big idea is not aid, but empowerment. If we accept that rape is a violent expression of the power imbalance between men and women, then you prevent rape by helping women get more power. Survivors have "de-traumatisation" sessions; they learn about women's rights, literacy, the economy, accounting, farming, business, self-defense, and the internet. Serving 90 survivors of gender violence aged 14 to 40 at a time, every six years the City of Joy graduates over 1,000 women leaders. When you think about it, it’s a pretty great model in general: Women are 51% of global society; empowering them will change everything.
- We talked about Coltan. Let’s talk about the other end of the phone and laptop production: Foxconn in ShenJen, China. Foxconn employs more than a million people in China. The suicide rate of people throwing themselves off the factory buildings is so high the company put nets up as if to catch fish. Why are young people, mostly women, killing themselves over making the latest iPhone? Faced with rapidly increasing demand, workers are subject to extreme pressures, humiliation, long working hours and horrific working conditions. And let’s not forget that many sweatshop workers around the world were driven from their rural homes by the collapse of small farming with the boom of the big agricultural industry. Leaving no other option than factory work for survival. So next time you go to make a call, let’s think about the people, especially the women, in the Congo and in China, who are suffering so we can have the newest technology. Shouldn’t the tech sector have some responsibility to do something about this? And what do we do about the ongoing rape and violence on women worldwide?
- WHAT CAN YOU DOThe enormity of the disease of violence on women and girls can feel overwhelming. To be apathetic on the issue of women’s rights, whether you are a man or a woman, is a suicidal behavior. Because the reality is uplifting women is not just good for women. It’s necessary for all of us.
- So what to do? I don't have the magic bullet answer. But I do have 10 suggestions on how to end violence on women, from the family to the global community to share, thanks to some help from many of you at Agile India 2014…
- Raise conscious childrenTeach our young girls that they can succeed in any profession they choose Encourage more girls to enter into math and science
- instead of complimenting girls on how pretty they look, we can tell them they’re good learners, great leaders, great artists
- yup that’s me as a kid building a dollhouse, and later furniture for our home, with my dad, who despite his trauma and faults did teach me I could be any profession when I grew up, including an engineer. I still want to become an astronaut. But it’s not just about growing up and being equal to men. Philosopher Ivan Illich asks why anyone would want to be equal in a violent world that will only produce more assault on women. It’s not enough to have gender equality in big corporations or the military which may be taking actions counter to feminist values. We’ve got to move beyond parity to embrace the values of feminism as well.
- Foster Gender AwarenessHow many of you when you walk into the room are conscious of how many women are present? Okay I'm not talking about a party where you fellows might be looking for a date. As a result of attending a women's college at Columbia University I think it was drilled into my mind to be aware of gender dynamics. I can't look at a meeting, a panel discussion, a conference, and not count the women speakers. Like seeing how only 25% of the people at this conference are women, and that number is actually pretty high for a tech conference!
- Photo Caption: Fox News Gets Four Men To Debate The War On Women:Even Fox News host Bret Baier had to admit that choosing four guys to discuss the "war on women" was "not the best booking of this panel”Here you can see a TV debate on the “war on women” that doesn’t feature a single woman panelist. So many times I've been at a talk and during the q and a men are raising their hands to ask questions and the facilitator is calling on all the guys in the audience. Maybe no women are raising their hands. Or maybe they just need encouragement to speak up. I've seen very successfully facilitated sessions where a Progressive Stack is used - alternating between men and women in the q & a - and encouraging step up, step up - step up your listening if you're a more vocal person, and step up your speaking if you've been quiet.
- Not exactly the peaceful language I might have chosen but… We have to change the business practices that discriminate against, drive away, or alienate women and minorities.
- As Martin Fowler wrote in his blog: “Anyone driven away from expressing innovation or writing excellent code is a loss to all of us, however unoffended we think they should be.”Business stands to benefit from the traditionally feminine characteristics of cooperation, the capacity for keeping the Overall Picture at the forefront of decision-making, a sense of generosity and collaboration which enhances productive output and creativity. http://martinfowler.com/bliki/AlienatingAtmosphere.html
- To increase women’s representation in technology we can follow the advice of the Anita Borg Institute for Women in Technology, and others: Foster a positive work place culture Create diversity of communication styles Look at how to create a healthy work-life balance, foster mentorship and teams that value diversity rather than stereotyping and tokenizing women and minorities, evaluate hiring practices and evaluation methods to value diversity rather than old models that may favor to put it frankly, “white upper-middle class men.”Hire more women, STEP program Start a specific initiative like the ThoughtWork’s global Women in Leadership Development (WiLD) programSupport girls who tech (TW examples: Women in Tech activities like Rails Girls, Black Girls Code, and others)
- Change Maternity and Paternity Laws LiciaRonzulli is an Italian member of the European Parliament known for bringing her daughter, Vittoria, to the Parliament’s plenary sessions. She first brought her to work in government at just 44 days old as a symbolic gesture to support more rights for women in reconciling work and family life. Source: momsrising.org
- This composite picture shows the mother-daughter duo at Parliament sessions from September 2010 to November 2013. Vittoria will be well-prepared to run for office herself one day! Ronzulli’s story has generated a lot of discussion on family leave policies… Photo credit: Vincent Kessler and Jean-Marc Loos/Reuters
- Only four countries in the world have ho national law requiring paid maternity leave: Liberia, Papua New Guinea, Swaziland, and the lovely United States.
- Honor and Pay Higher Wages for Traditionally Female WorkIt’s not just about increasing the number of women in traditionally male professions. It’s also about uplifting, economically and culturally, traditionally female work - from house work, to nurses, to teachers.
- Why is it that we pay football coaches and actors millions more than we pay the professionals who are educating our children, and caring for our aging parents? Are not these people the sources of healthy life? Certainly more than the guardians of the next prime time sports event or blockbuster film... And also it’s not enough for women to rise to the top in traditionally male fields. Traditionally female fields can also be embraced by men.
- And we need to support full rights for domestic workers who are mostly women, who deserve, as we all do, a living wage and respectful treatment. This cartoon is an ad for a nanny hotline that utilizes cell phones and SMS technology to help educate nannies in the US on their rights. See full case study in Beautiful Trouble here: http://beautifultrouble.org/case/public-art-nanny-hotline/
- Educate Women & Girls It is a fact that giving women education, work, the ability to control own income, inherit and own property benefits society. if a women is empowered, her children and family will be better off, the family prospers, the village prospers, and eventually so does the whole country. Source: Isabelle Allende TED talk
- Can I see you raise your hand if you know who this is? This young woman’s name is Malala. And she’s not afraid to tell the world, and the Taliban militants that want her dead, that education is every girl’s right in Pakistan, and everywhere. She survive a major physical attack that launched a bullet through her skull. Malala is a brave and noble poster child for the global campaign to ensure equal access to education for girls.
- Yes every girl deserves an education. But we've got to ask ourselves what kind of education our kids are receiving. Setting up schools in the quote Third World aided in the installment of colonization. Now instead of rural children learning from their families and communities the local ways, kids are being taught English, computer science, and math. Why not? After all, in the current economic system, that’s where the jobs are. Well what gets lost along the way? Indigenous wisdom, practical knowledge. If the power goes out, or if for some reason - natural disaster, global warming, violence or war, etc. - access to imported food is cut off, what will most of us urban-dwellers do, eat our computers?
- This kid tried, and it doesn’t look like it’s working.
- Although these computers do look a little more appealing... The fact of the matter is that farming wisdom and many of the homemaking skills traditionally designated to women are actually essential for our survival and well being.
- The Barefoot College here in India recognizes that and has created programs to uplift and celebrate the talents of the poorest of the poor. I've been amazed at how throughout my travels the past few months in India and Nepal when I meet with elders or even parents my age with young kids in school, they often say, "oh I'm stupid, I don't know anything My granddaughter knows more than I do." Really? Because I sure don't know how to make yak cheese or identify which herb is medicinal and which one will kill me. What's happening is an evaluation of different types of knowledge that prioritizes the western schooling system over all other wisdom. And because in a capitalist system we so strongly value certain employment over others, there naturally comes the drive to want our kids to be doctors, lawyers and engineers. But we can’t lose sight of holistic, interdisciplinary learning that values traditional wisdom and skills. Brilliant TED talk on Barefoot College by founder Bunker Roy:http://www.ted.com/talks/bunker_roy.htmlMore info on Barefoot College on their excellent website:http://www.barefootcollege.org/
- Educate Ourselves We can educate ourselves about these bold women and elevate their profiles. Of all the books in the cannon of literature at most colleges, most are by male authors, and growing up most of my heroes were men (well and fictional beings like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles...). It doesn't have to be that way.
- ThoughtWorks is cultivating a project to increase the web presence of female heroes by adding wikipedia profiles for a list of over 50 powerful women, some of them Nobel Laureates, who don't have much of a web presence. We think of the web as spreading the accessibility to knowledge, and in that sense, power, but if we repeat the same patriarchal patterns online, we are just using another tool for the same end.
- In the workplace we can coordinate talks, workshops, and events to better educate ourselves and each other on women’s rights. ThoughtWorks also coordinates events on Ada Lovelace day and codejams on International Women’s Day, which by the way is coming up on March 8th.
- Most men are not rapists. But most men may know someone who has been sexually, physically or verbally violent. What do we do when we see violence, or hear about it from a friend or family member? Do we speak up or stay silent?
- Picture is of Congolese Dr. Mukwege, who is a visionary and resident gynecologist at City of Joy - here he’s receiving a V-men award from the VDAY movement to end violence on women and girls. I want to emphasize how crucial a role every man can play in ending violence on women.
- And in speaking up I want to note the importance of working toward acceptance and full rights for people of all genders - not just men and women - but trans and third gender folks too.
- Make it visibleSampat Pal Devi and the Gulabi Gang in Pink Sarishttp://www.gulabigang.in/
- Project unbreakable - a 19 year old photographer starts taking pictures of her friends holding up signs with sentences their rapists said to them during the act. The project goes viral on tumblr. Thousands of pictures are submitted and it’s still growing. http://projectunbreakable.tumblr.com/
- We need a strong, vocal, well-supported movement to stop this violence on women until justice is done for every mother, daughter and sister who has been violated, and future generations can think of rape and sexual trauma the same we in the United States now think of segregation, of separate water fountains for blacks and whites: as a backward practice of old times that is obviously wrong and illegal. You heard Martin Fowler say it: IT professionals here in India, in America, and pretty much the world over are incredibly privileged. We have air conditioned offices, nice homes, stable abundant incomes. And that privilege comes with a blessed responsibility to be part of the change. And you are NOT JUST CODE MONKEYS. You’re brilliant, creative people.
- Dr. Shiva says that the case of the Delhi gang rape victim changed everything in India, got young people active, young men marched for women's rightsPublic protests took place in New Delhi where Demonstrators were shot with water cannon and tear gas shells, and arrested. More than 600 women belonging to various organisations demonstrated right here in Bangalore. Protests occurred online as well on the social networking sites Facebook and WhatsApp, with users replacing their profile images with a black dot symbol.Tens of thousands signed an online petition protesting the incident.This is just one example of online-offline coordinated campaigning to raise awareness and stop violence on women.
- The Agile Manifesto values:1. Individuals and interactions over Processes and tools RELATIONSHIPS, RELATIONSHIPS, RELATIONSHIPS!!! 2. Working software over Comprehensive documentationgrassroots changemaking non-profits over lengthy UN resolutions I used to work at the UN and sit through hours and hours of boring negotiations on syntax and grammar, while outside climate change and violence on women rages on... 3. Customer collaboration over Contract negotiationforming coalitions, interactive organizing rather than just big NGOs Currently our movements for social change are partitioned into causes: women's rights, poverty eradication, stoping racism and homophobia, environmental justice, and so on. But if we fail to see the interconnectedness of these injustices they will only continue to proliferate like a cancer which sees no organ differentiation. Responding to change over Following a planBeing able to be flexible, adaptive to what comes out in the news, nimble. What CODEPINK is best known for...
- http://www.mensstoryproject.org/Started in USA, now in Chile and other parts of Latin America Mission: To strengthen social norms that support healthy masculinities and gender equality, and to help eliminate gender-based violence, homophobia and other oppressions that are intertwined with masculinities, through men´s public story-sharing events, documentary films and other mass media.Storytelling: For preserving and passing on traditions,for challenging and breaking traditions,and for the creation of new traditions.
- CODEPINK aerial image on Mother’s Day on the beach in California
- Creativity and satire in organizing Indian Comedy Collective All India Backchod made this sarcastic youtube about rape which went viral and reached over three million views on YouTube. AIB said: Every sexual assault case in India inspires a string of stupid and hateful remarks against women. This is our response to those remarks.Watch it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8hC0Ng_ajpY
- I started with the One Billion Rising video -- Dance in the streets, flashmobs, creative ways to spread a message and build a movement
- I want to highlight one resource a team of colleagues and I collaborated on that’s hot off the presses: Beautiful Trouble book, guide to activist tactics and principleslike an encyclopedia for ruckus-raising changemakers
- but you can also read it online (so no i didn’t schlep copies all the way to india to sign for you and you won’t have to lay out any cash to get this knowledge!) and you can check out the new visualizaiton of the book on the siteFast Company wrote in a review of the book: “Although the book is geared toward the activist community, many of the tactics and ideologies discussed lend themselves to startups--and even the corporate world--quite easily. Some sections of the book, such as “Putting Your Target In A Decision Dilemma,” and “Simple Rules Can Have Grand Results,” even fit in perfectly with the corpus of business leadership literature.”http://www.fastcompany.com/1834316/beautiful-trouble-what-activists-can-teach-us-about-leadership-and-crowdfunding
- They are bold.“Well behaved women rarely make history.” Or, as the great novelist Isabelle Allende put it: “We need mavericks, dissidents, adventurers, outsiders, and rebels who ask questions, bend the rules, and take risks. Nice people with common sense do not make interesting characters.”
- We all have fear – maybe it’s fear of losing our unique privileges and wealth, fear of losing our loved ones, fear of failure or risk. Fear drives sexism. Fear drives war. But these women show us that it’s possible to transcend our fears and be a visible, vocal presence for a different paradigm. A paradigm where we belong to each other, where our successes are contingent on rather than competitive against each other’s successes.
- And I'm going to make an assumption here and venture to say, based on what I've witnessed just in the first 8 hours of this conference, that you all have this trait too. You are bold. You are at the cutting edge of technology, which is the revolution of our lifetimes. Agile went out on a limb and questioned business as usual. And created a foundation for collaborative workspace, for more communication, for acceptance of failure and for big picture thinking broken down into bite-sized steps. And that's exactly what's needed in the movements for justice today. Thinking outside the box, Boldness, Audacity, Courage and Fearless Conviction. And with that boldness, what can you do? The possibilities are endless.
- One in Three women will be raped or beaten in her lifetime. But sexual violence affects more than one third of our society. I want to ask you to please stand up if you know someone sexually assaulted, beaten or harassed - a family member, a friend, a colleague, a neighbor, a stranger you met on the plane perhaps. Stand up if you have ever witnesses someone make an inappropriate comment to a woman in the office. Stand up if you believe violence on women and girls must end! Look around the room... we are all in this together. It’s time we do more than speak words, we stand up, take action, and, as Gandhi said, “Be the Change” we want to see in the world. Together, we can end violence on women and girls. Thank you.