Webminar series with purple glasses

Due to the Universal lockdown caused by the COVID-19 crisis all our lives have changed.

One of the changes may be that some of us have spent much more time than usual watching movies or series in Netflix or HBO, that’s why from DEI project we thought this could be a good opportunity to help our IE community to use their Purple glasses. You will be probably wondering what this “Purple glasses” mean, it is simply to look at things around you with a gender perspective.

Fortunately we had the collaboration of Ana Fuentes, Media & Gender Expert, to achieve this first objective. She spoke about how androcentric culture it’s been always behind the scenes through the producer, actors and audience lenses; creating media by and for males.

This male perspective puts the man in a dominant role, being the protagonist mainly, leaving the woman in a secondary place: playing the role of being a “beautiful object” to be seen or just someone to be saved by the man.

We could talk with her about Bechdel test, sometimes called the Mo Movie Measure or Bechdel Rule is a simple test which names the following three criteria: (1) it has to have at least two women in it, who (2) who talk to each other, about (3) something besides a man.

As simple as this test might seem to you, not every movie passes it. Movies like “How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World”, “Klaus” or “Bohemian Rhapsody” are movies that failed it. It worries me that two of them are children movies and  makes me think about the example we are teaching them without even being conscious about it.

Another change that has come to some women’s lives it’s been having to share 24/7 with their abusers in their homes. This measure of prevention because of COVID-19 spread, has caused only in Spain 60% more calls to 016 in April 2020 (gender-based violence telephone information) compared to the same month in 2019. This situation happens all around the “COVID-19 World” with different percentages and resources for the survivors.

In Spain

The advice Ana Fuentes gave us if we want to help a neighbour that we think might be suffering violence in her home is to reach out, knock on her door and ask if everything is ok. Tell her you are there. Hopefully you might be wrong about the circumstances, but one thing that this crisis may have shown us is that caring about each other is one of the most important things we have.

This was the other objective we had, to rise the awareness of this awful situation and to give the tools available for us to be able to help those women who could be around us in danger.

We will continue these DEI project webminar series with Carmen Morales, IE Professor and Almagesto Managing Partner talking about “Inclusive Language: Gender Neutral Language and Culturally Inclusive Language”, we encourage you to join us on the 26th of May at 18:00. This will be a unique and useful opportunity to learn more about the power of language, and how to use it really well. Click here to join.