Everyday sexism or a deep rooted issue?

Feminist Society is launching the campaign IC SEXISM on campus to document the experiences of students and staff with respect to facing everyday sexism at Imperial College London.

The College, as the top STEM subject higher institution in the UK as well as the world plays an important role in providing a place where the people in the various faculties are given a place to work and achieve things on an egalitarian basis. Imperial should be a place where biases of gender are muted in the face of equality of talent, hard work and determination.

But – as is evident – The ratio of male to female in the Imperial in some courses is widely known to be heavily skewed with some like Physics and Engineering being far over the college average of 65% male students.

This disparity, attributed to and integrated with the wider societal issues to do with gender, makes Imperial vulnerable to the gender discrimination that may sweep into various aspects of the wellbeing of the members.

Hence, it is important to get a conversation started on this. Innocuous statements may hide the bigger picture. It is in the pixels that the picture is hidden, so why not zoom into it?

We would like to know about your experience of college life – any instance that you felt undermined the balance expected to exist in both academic and social pursuits the College campuses. The experiences of members of the College, by being part of a world class community, have the potential to reverberate much beyond.

This information will be collected and moderated confidentially and your experiences, however minute, will make part of a large mosaic that will seek to understand the conversation on campus and more broadly, initiate change.

The campaign aims:

To gather students’ experiences

We hope to gather your experiences of sexism through our survey, Through sharing your stories (anonymously) with the student body, the College and the Union, we hope to raise awareness of the level of sexism experienced by students, and highlight areas where change is required to combat sexism on campus. If you have an experience of sexism you want to share, fill in a short form at imperialcollegeunion.org/icsexism.

To get people talking about gender and feminism

Through a series of informal and fun events as well as a panel discussion, we hope to start an open and inclusive conversation on campus about what constitutes sexism and why it’s a problem. More broadly, we’d also like to encourage more discussion around gender & feminism.

To empower students to make change happen

Through our discussion based events, women’s space and weekly Feminist Society meetings, you can take part in discussions aimed at finding ways of tackling sexist behaviour on campus, be it through creating a supportive women’s network at Imperial, or influencing the union or college to change its policies... or any other idea you might have!

Visit us at facebook.com/groups/icsexism or tweet @ICSexism to give your views and to find out about future events.