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Women in the Developing World - NHS Formation x FTF 2017

This year, Nossal’s female empowerment group, Formation, partnered with Feel.Think.Flow, a nonpartisan, non-for-profit student run organisation that seeks to promote youth engagement with the humanities. Together, we put together a summit titled ‘Women in the Developing World’ on the 26 August. The event brought together people from all over Melbourne who were eager to learn about how women from various parts of the world experience inequality and how this is different, and is affected by feminism and sexism in the western world. It was a hugely successful event as all participants eagerly engaged themselves in the discussion and activities throughout the day; leaving the event more educated and inspired to create change in narrowing the disparities between women's experiences of gender inequality in the developed and developing worlds.

The day began with a talk by Dr Alexandra Gartrell (Professor of Social Sciences at Monash University) on social segregation who informed us about the experiences of disabled women in Cambodia. She shared inspirational stories of women who overcame the stigma that was associated with their conditions and eventually found fulfillment in their lives through tasks that would allow them to make a living for themselves. Through her storytelling, Dr Gartrell highlighted the privilege that we experience in Australia, as the social prejudice is far less prominent.

Participants then broke into groups, who then engaged in discussions of the issues that were brought to light by Dr. Gartrell, comparing them to aspects of their own lives - education, leadership, work and other areas where sexism is inherently evident.

Later, we had scheduled a panel discussion on the day where Dr. Briony Schroor, Dr. Gartrell and Zoe Cantwell (a member of Feel.Think.Flow), answered and discussed questions raised by the audience, in terms of women’s rights progressions, social segregation and female agency respectively.

The last activity for the day was the IPS, an Interactive Political Simulation, which required groups to represent a stakeholder (such as the government, businesses in the private sector, or external NGOs) in attempting to resolve the scenarios that were presented to them. The two scenarios of the day were the effects of Yazidi culture on Yazidi women, and Japanese workplace culture. Negotiations between the stakeholders became intense as they were all in pursuit of their own interests. However, after all the heated discussions, there was definitely a sense of realisation that it was very difficult to come to one solid conclusion to suit all the stakeholders. And this was the purpose of the IPS - to show students that global issues cannot be solved in an instant, because of the battling agendas of different political groups, and their desire to pursue their own internal goals than to focus on how they might influence each other.

The Formation leadership team and Feel.Think.Flow worked very hard over the three months before the summit, with Sam and Aria from Formation, and Tiger and Elizabeth from Feel.Think.Flow putting all the effort possible to make the day a successful and fruitful one. To Dr. Schroor, Dr. Gartrell and Zoe Cantwell: thank you for being on our panel and engaging in deep and insightful discussion about women in the developing world. To Feel.Think.Flow: thank you for working with Formation on this hard, but rewarding project, and best of luck for all summits in future! And finally, to the attendees: thank you for coming, listening and engaging in our summit - we hope you had fun, but also learned many new things that have widened your political perspective.

We look forward to hosting more events like this in the future!

Aria Sunga, Samantha Choy, Jessie Tang, Karina Tam, Melania Iskandar, Christine Mina, Anisha Gupta, Kate Cooke, Shalini Menon, Emily Lai, Victoria Xiong, Susan Park & Tithi Varia

The Formation Leadership Committee