Happy International Women’s Day!
Almost exactly one year ago, we ran our first workshop in Oxford. Since then, we’ve come so far as an organisation and as a community. Our events have attracted over 1000 people in 2 countries, and our number of Student Leaders this academic year doubled. In our pitching session, we teach the ‘Golden Circle’ rule by Simon Sinek, essentially, he tells us to ‘start with why’ - to explain why we do something, rather than simply state what we do. We’ve explained to the world why we do, but over this past year, we wanted to find out why you believed in us and joined us.
The development of entrepreneurial skills was voted the top reason for joining us by 36.1% of survey participants, closely followed by 34.7% stating that they desired to support other women and to fight for gender equality (which we termed ‘feminism’ in the chart below). And it is this point that we wanted to discuss today – on International Women’s Day!
Our members are not just concerned about developing their own skills and confidence, but also with the gender gap in society as a whole, and want to help and support each other. So today, we’ve selected a few of the quotes from our Student Leaders’ application that we found most inspirational.
‘I want to make sure, that each girl, no matter their nationality, is confident enough to reach even the highest goals’. – 1st Year Bio-Chemistry Student.
‘Ideally there would be no need for girl specific initiatives, but seeing as there still is a very real inequality in opportunities between genders, I think it is important to provide workshops to attempt to reduce that inequality’. – 2nd Year Bio-Chemistry Student.
‘In a society where the voices of male entrepreneurs often dominate that of females, it is imperative to actively create environments for young females to explore their capabilities in this area.’ – 1st Year Law Student.
‘Pushing women to believe in their talent is a great first step to gender equality.’ – Final Year European and International Studies Student.
We think that women supporting women inspires positive change for the future, and that’s why today is so important! And if you’re interested in what else we’ve been up to over this past year, keep your eyes peeled for our Impact Report coming out soon!