International forum illuminates gender divide
As four men were found guilty Tuesday of gang raping a 23-year-old student in New Delhi last year, finding an awareness for global women’s issues like rape and the victimization of females can be a first step to overcoming them, said university faculty Monday.
“International Women’s Issues” set the stage for the first international forum of the fall semester. Held in Farber Hall, the hour-long discussion consisted of three female University of South Dakota professors sharing their input on policy, media and gender pay gap issues facing women at home and abroad.
Monday’s international forum was moderated by emeritus economics professor Benno Wymar, who has supplied international forum topics that have spanned more than 26 years at USD.
Domestically, the issue from a policy perspective is in the numbers, said Shane Nordyke, assistant political science professor.
“We are in this kind of post feminist period where issues affecting women are being internalized instead of being projected to a national stage,” Nordyke said.
Whether in Congress, where women make up only 18.3 percent of its members, or the fact that the United States has 50 percent more infant deaths on the day of birth than all other industrialized countries combined, Nordyke said a student awareness to such statistics can correct misinformation about the state of gender equality in the United States.
“Knowing what is happening domestically is the first step to getting out of these situations,” Nordyke said.
Dealing with women’s issues in Vermillion can be as much as understanding how, why and when women are portrayed the way they are in the media, said guest speaker Miglena Sternadori, assistant contemporary media and journalism professor.
“We hear too much about women as victims,” she said.
Sternadori, who also teaches courses in gender studies, said in mass media, women are perceived as their most interesting when they are suffering. Instead, news coverage seemingly ignores portraying “women as agents of change.”
To combat this, Sternadori, who was joined by Nordyke and Lucy Wenqian Dai, assistant sociology professor, on the forum panel, said change can be a matter of what stories receive coverage in the news, like the global woman empowerment campaign, “One Billion Rising.”
Junior John Hausauer attended the event with the mentality that equality between the sexes is an issue for everyone, no matter the gender.
“I am kind of interested in women’s issues, and it is really important for equality in
general,” he said.
