Global women’s issues discussed at lecture

Global gender issues were discussed last night during the second lecture of a five part series at the San Luis Obispo Public Library.

Held by the Cal Poly women’s and gender studies department, psychology and child development professor Patrice Engle led the talk and focused on global gender issues pertaining to women’s rights around the world as they compare to the United States, as well as ways to improve current situations

“I think it is really important that we as Americans understand our effect on the rest of the world,” she said.

Engle touched on topics including abortion, maternity and the treatment of women in foreign countries. She said it was surprising for people to learn that gender equality issues are relevant in the U.S, and trail behind countries such as France, Canada and Switzerland.

“In other countries we see discrimination that is extreme,” Engle said. “Here, women get married, take their husbands name, and in a sense think that they should have their value through him rather than their value as people themselves. By looking at the extreme we can see a little but more of ourselves.”

She said that often women do not ask for equal pay, better living conditions, childcare or maternity leave.

“The child is the child of a mother and a father, and not the mother’s only responsibility,” Engle said. “We have to find ways to support women to be full human beings and caregivers, and men need to be caregivers too.”

Engle said she is passionate on topics dealing with women’s rights because her father was sexist. Although she said that he was a product of his time, she knew back then that it was unfair that he wanted her brother to get his Ph.D. and her to go to secretarial school.

“When I finally got started in my early feminist years, I would get together with other women and we would say, ‘look at all these ways we’ve been put down,'” Engle said. “We discovered with these blinding insights all of the different kinds of gender discrimination that we are around all the time. It’s as if once that light turns on, it never goes off.”

She said that people need to be aware of the tremendous amount women contribute to critical caregiving roles that is rarely recognized or valued.

“It is trying to make that invisible world visible,” Engle said.

Engle’s lecture is one of a series that has come from the collaboration of women’s and gender studies professor Rachel Fernflores and San Luis Obispo Library manager, Kristine Tardiff. In an attempt to provide a forum to talk about women’s issues in a non-academic setting, each lecture will feature a different Cal Poly professor and topic.

Fernflores said that she wanted to do something beyond working with students and decided to reach out to the community through the library.

She also mentioned how many of her students are surprised to find out that the U.S is not as gender neutral as they may think.

“(Students) tend to think that things are very advanced for women in the United States relative to other countries,” she said. “Unfortunately we lag behind quite a bit in terms of basic maternity leave and healthcare. If we don’t have adequate systems of healthcare that meet the constant health needs of children, we find that poverty rates are a lot higher.”

Tardiff said that she wants to attract non- Cal Poly students to increase adult programs and life long learning at the library.

With about 60 attendees at the lecture, a ten person increase from the previous event in January, Tardiff said she thought it went extremely well.

“Women wanted more women’s events,” she said. “This is an important issue.”

The next lecture will be at 6 p.m. on March 3 at the San Luis Obispo Public Library. The topic will be “The Bitch Manifesto Revisited: Feminism, Gender, and Religion,” with speaker Dr. Judy Saltzman.