Find out what happened at the "Let's talk about gender, baby!" international training course.

Last week we gathered in Bușteni with young people from 7 European countries, to talk about gender – gender equality, gender-based violence, gender roles or stereotypes, identity, intersectionality – these were just some of the concepts we explored, before also looking into the gender dimension in the media and the power it has to perpetuate stereotypes and influence attitudes. We continued to explore the relationship we have with media content through the lenses of Newspaper Theatre, and the entire training was conducted following the design thinking methodology.

We looked not only at theoretical concepts or legislation (both national, for each participant country, and European), but also at ourselves, and talked about what concrete actions we can take to shape a just and equitable society. Each person who participated has now returned home, where they will implement activities at local level to make people in their communities more gender-aware.

The methodological framework of the project is based on non formal education with a main focus on Design Thinking (DT). DT is a human-centered methodology which allows us to design empathic activist actions, looking for genuine needs, fears, motivations, aspirations, which we identify when working with young people and with different community actors related to gender issues in media. DT is especially used when looking for innovative solutions to solve complex problems in contexts such as biased gender representation in the media.

The objective of this training course were:

  1. To build the competencies of 23 youth workers from 7 countries to identify and tackle gender stereotypes and prejudices in the media and promote gender-sensitive media content through Design Thinking (DT) methodology.
  2. Raising awareness, engagement and critical thinking towards the portrayal of men and women in the media among 7 organizations from Europe by using different non formal education methods.
  3. To raise awareness of the importance of gender equality in the media through an awareness campaign developed through DT and reaching at least 1400 people from 7 countries, including media professionals, civil society and the general public.

The youth workers who participated in this training course have also built competences to tackle gender inequality and promote gender sensitive media content. Through the training activity (combined with the preparation before and the practical phase following it), they gained knowledge about gender equality issues and how to work on gender equality issues with young people, with a focus on representation in the media and increasing critical thinking among young people. They have also learnt to identify gender stereotypes and prejudices and increase their critical thinking through analysing media content from a gender perspective.

One of the core educational approaches for the organisers was related to global education and the promotion of sustainable behaviors at the individual level and the organizational level. Therefore, here are a few aspects that were highly integrated:

– vegetarian menu;

– recycling facilities;

– use of recycled paper and reduced use of materials in general in order to avoid waste + participants were informed at large about our principles on environmental sustainability in order to be aware of the reasons and needs for doing this and were encouraged and supported in choosing the most environmentally friendly mode of transport, especially for participants coming from the neighboring countries.

This training is part of the Let’s talk about gender, baby! project, financed by Erasmus+, a program of the European Union.