To celebrate International Women’s Day last month (8 March) I volunteered for the 2019 Media Trust Women’s Voices event at the Google Academy in Victoria. The half-day meeting brought together around 130 volunteers from across the media and creative industry to share their expertise with charities that support, advocate and campaign for women. For example, organisations fighting period poverty, rape and sexual abuse crisis centres and shelters taking care of refugees. Prior to the event, every volunteer was matched to a charity they would be supporting and the challenge that they’d be tackling on the day with a team of 4-5 other volunteers.
I was briefed on the charity National Numeracy and their specific challenge: helping women take action to improve their numeracy skills, particularly those from lower-socio economic backgrounds in the UK. Currently, there is a gap between men and women when it comes to confidence in dealing with numbers. This lack of self-belief does not only hold women back but can slow down economic equality and social mobility. For example, in some careers – such as nursing and midwifery – women are hesitant to put themselves forwards for a promotion as they feel that they can’t improve their mathematical aptitude. National Numeracy want to empower these women with a ‘can do’ attitude to numbers. By demystifying numeracy and showing them that we deal with it on a daily basis (e.g. cost of a meal when splitting the bill, calculating discounts etc.,) these women should be confident about their numeracy skills and continue to progress along career trajectories.
Before meeting the National Numeracy representative, Kayla Fuller, we were welcomed by the Media Trust CEO Su-Mei Thompson, and heard from Matt Brittin, Google’s President of EMEA Business and Operations. Matt spoke to the audience about women who inspire him and the importance of gender equality in tech.
A side note/interesting fact: Google Translate translates over 100 billion words every day across 100 languages. What are the top three phrases that are translated around the globe? How are you? Thank you, and I love you. He ended his speech by reminding everyone that it’s always,
“Better to speak up and get it wrong, then not say anything at all and push for social change.”
Next up was the key note speaker Kate Dale, Head of Brand and Digital Strategy at Sport England, who leads her team with the multi-award winning ‘This Girl Can’ campaign. Kate explained that back in October 2014, Sport England found a 1.8 million gender gap between the number of men and women being active across the country. Her dissection of the campaign – from the ethnographic research, to making the decision to use the word ‘girl’ over ‘woman’ in the campaign name, to launching #fitgotreal – was peppered with funny, relatable anecdotes and stories of the complex relationship women have with their bodies, self-confidence and physical abilities. Her talk left us volunteers feeling inspired and ready to tackle the charity comms challenge for the next few hours.
Buzzing from Kate’s talk and the excitement in the room, my group worked closely to brainstorm ideas to solve the National Numeracy’s comms challenge. Our discussions were captured and circulated to everyone in the team to ensure that we could all keep in touch after the workshop. We left feeling positive and hopeful that Kayla and her team could use a few of the ideas to help address the important task ahead of them.
It was a fantastic event and a great networking opportunity to meet some amazing women in the industry. I saw the morning as a very positive ‘work out’ for all the volunteers; stretching the imagination to come up with creative ideas, exercising our comms skills to help lift some of the incredible work that the charities do. I left the event feeling optimistic for the women and the charities in the room. In the spirit of Kate’s campaign and what it embodies, yes… These Girls Can!