EDUCATE
LIMITED LEADERSHIP ACADEMY With Paula Dunn
How We Can Minimise Gender Bias by Creating a Conscious Inclusive Community! I recently had a conversation with a close friend talking about why do we bother having “International Women’s Day” when it’s only 1 day out of 365? There’s so much hype around it on the day and then we hear nothing for the rest of the year? Nothing seems to change. Good point! My next question is, why do we celebrate Valentine’s Day? Or Christmas Day? Or Hannukah? We celebrate those days because there is a meaning behind it. Meaning comes from our beliefs, beliefs come from our set of values, our values come from various influences such as our society, culture, religion, upbringing, and past experiences. These values set the tone for our thoughts and how we feel about a subject. All of this determines whether we recognise International Women’s Day and play our part to make the world a more gender equal place or just treat it as another day in the calendar. Bottomline, our beliefs form part of who we are, ie. our identity. Being a strong activist on Diversity and Inclusion myself having been born into a minority group of individuals with a facial deformity. I’ve experienced firsthand what it looks and feels like to be physically and emotionally degraded for my appearance, undervalued, underappreciated, overlooked and excluded from my peers growing up.
12 | eYs Magazine, Autumn 2021
What made it worse, was being born a female on top of my facial deformity added a complexity into my life. Society values and rewards “looks and beauty,” it’s all part of natural selection. Beauty signifies health and vitality. The ability to produce viable off-spring to perpetuate the bloodline. Even though we may not today think entirely this way or even be conscious of our decisions. Our bodies know what our bodies want without us having to think too much about it. My life’s success was pre-determined at birth by the medical profession, my teachers, and my peers. The medical profession told my parents based on research data “These kids don’t live long”, my teachers placed me into “slow learners’ classes – Maths and English” because they thought I had an intellectual impairment because I wasn’t grasping concepts as quickly as my peers, and my peers “taunted and teased me daily” because I didn’t look “normal” so they thought it would be a great game to play with me. My parents of course, saw all this and feared for what my future might hold especially when at such a young age I was already a target in society. The feared, would I have a career, be financially successful and find love and marry. So across all levels of my life, I faced certain beliefs and biases from others around me. I had two choices, 1. Accept what others thought about me and live the life they thought I should live or 2. Prove them wrong! And live the life I wanted to live. I choose to challenge!
