Las Palmas de Gran Canaria City Council impulses the drive “Women Things” to fight the stereotypes against gender this 8th of march
This drive was imagined to replace the burden of responsibility from victims to the citizens in general.
The councillor of Equality and Diversity, Mari Carmen Reyes, has presented the local drive on the occasion of the celebration of the International Women Day the next 8th of march, which is named “Women’s Things”.
It focused on giving protagonism to the femenine references which actually exist in Gran Canaria in some activities which are wrongly associated with masculinity. Throughout the promotion of the hashtag #CosasdeMujeres (#WomenThings) it is pretended to incentivize the public to share their experiences with this problematic issue on social networks.
The main goal is to recognise the fame of women, most of them muted, and then make them visible especially to the young public and to make the public think why there are some specific achievements related to the masculine gender.
Mari Carmen Reyes assured that this drive tries to show the impact and to display the fact of how some activities and professions are presented with a huge gap between women and men and how some young audience can’t find female references in some of those professions and restricting their own will to access and to contribute on them in the future.
Reyes has cheered citizens to participate in this 8th of march painting the streets of the city purple – the windows, the balconies, our cars and our bikes,etc.- this was made because of the impossibility of meeting due the coronavirus crisis.
The drive image will be installed in the public domain all along the whole city and it will be transported on the streets by three Guaguas Municipales vehicles.
These posters will tell different stories starred by canary women that after achieving unquestionable leverages in their own disciplines -most of them masculinised- are unknown for the average public.There have been also three promotional videos for this drive in order to spread the message on many different platforms.
The singer Olga Cerpa can be seen going over the career of these three women in each video, taking important attention to a clearly misogynistic phrase and showing the silly behind the statement:
“What do you mean when saying “something is a women’s thing?
Activities program
They will take place the 8th of march in Plaza de Las Lagunetas in the capital of Gran Canaria, which soon it will be named “Plaza del Feminismo” – “Feminism Square”
From 10 am to 1 pm, a bouble group formed by 20-25 students from the Instituto de Enseña Secundaria de La Isleta, will be splitted in groups and they will participate in three different activities.
The first one will be a deep inmerssion on VR, a practise made previously in the last event comemorating the 25th of November, Elimination of Violence Against Women International Day. In this stand, the participants will be able to experiment many different scenarios related to misogynist violence from the victim perspective, learning the differences between the explicit and the less explicit levels of violence, they will count with many different interactive screens.
The student body will participate in an activity leaded by a psychologist. The students will develop role playing games, discussions and many other exercises to help them notice, identify and avoid possible misogynistic behaviours or advantages, damages, privileges and cristal roofs that can be broken day by day depending on the gender.
The third activity will be performed by the student body in a workshop of reggaeton music deconstruction and many others urban music genres. These workshops will be formed by a DJ, a sociologist and a social worker and they will help them to identify pieces of the lyrics considered harmful to society. They will also exercise the creative face of students replacing these lyrics with constructive alternatives without any misogynist detail,
Lastly a ceremony will be celebrated to give many different awards related to ‘TikTokers Competition’ against gender violence. A contest celebrated the last 25th of November that couldn’t be celebrated due to the restrictions of the coronavirus crisis. This competition counted with the participation of groups of students from different local high schools and it was conceived to record a short video in this new world known app.
