International Women’s Day 2022

Every year on 8 March, our University community comes together to celebrate International Women’s Day (IWD). IWD aims to celebrate the diversity of our community and encourages us to work together to challenge abuse, harassment and discrimination faced by women. During the past year, we have taken a number of steps to make progress on tackling violence against women and girls in our community through the work of the Gender Safety Group, and we have continued to work in collaboration with our community and the Gender Equality Group to foster a culture which enables women to achieve their full potential, in line with our values of respect and inclusion.

However, we recognise that there is still more work to be done, as the Covid pandemic continues to have a disproportionate impact on gender equality and marginalised women in particular continue to struggle for their rights. In light of this, our IWD activity this year is aligned to the UN Women theme, ‘Gender equality today for a sustainable tomorrow’ and we are taking this opportunity to showcase the exceptional work of women in our community in the areas of climate change, sustainability and social justice. This follows directly on from a fantastic array of events and activities, many of which were led by and featured incredible women, taking place for LGBTQ+ History Month last month.

There are a number of events happening this week and continuing throughout the month, beginning with the ‘Women of Influence’ speaker series event on Monday 7 March 12:00 – 13:00 with alumna and Council member, Amoetsoe Mkwena. You can view the full list of events taking place on the 'Events' web page here.

Once again we have asked colleagues across the University for nominations and profiles of women this year who have demonstrated outstanding commitment to tackling climate change, making progress in sustainability and advancing social justice. We were delighted to receive over 40 nominations from across the University and we want to say a big THANK YOU to celebrate all of the fantastic colleagues, students and alumnae listed in the newsletter above – you can click on “read more” under each article to see the full nomination text.

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