Women of KWMC

To celebrate International Women's Day 2014 the women of Knowle West Media Centre and recent visitors examine their hopes for the future and the barriers they face as women today. www.kwmc.org.uk

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Lets start by giving women a voice. Only 30% of characters who spoke in the top films last year were female.

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75% of women end up in the cleaning, catering, cashiering, and clerical professions. 90% of women want jobs that help people but 60% of women believe technology jobs cannot fulfil this need.

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Only 15% of protagonists in 2013’s top films were female.

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Women were found to feel consistently misunderstood by food, health care, electronic, tech, and investment marketers. The UK loses out on a £0.6 billion financial opportunity by not targeting women correctly.

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Our gender shouldn't hold us back. 54% of women working part-time have been ‘employed below their potential’. That's 2.8 million women. Just 27% of Science and Engineering Technicians, 15% of ICT professionals and 5.5% of Engineering professionals are female. Women make up just 1.3% of the top posts in the armed forces and they make up just 13.2% of the judiciary profession.

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More women than men attend university and female students are achieving better grades than men in almost every measure yet fewer than a third of the UK's most influential jobs are held by women.

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Kathryn Bigelow, director of The Hurt Locker, is the only woman EVER to win a Best Director Oscar. Only 4 women have ever been nominated. Women made up only 6% of Directors for the top movies of 2013. There were NO female nominees for directing, cinematography, film editing, writing (original screenplay), or music (original score) during last year’s Academy Awards.

[womenofkwmc]

Attitudes need to change: 2 women a week are killed by their partner or ex-partner. 1 in 5 people think it is acceptable for a man to hit or slap his female partner in response to her being dressed in ‘sexy’ or revealing clothing in public. 26% of people believe a woman wearing this clothing should be held either wholly or partly responsible for being sexually assaulted or raped.

[womenofkwmc]

Don't hold us back and pay us differently. The full time gender pay gap is 10%  and the average part-time pay gap is 34.5%.

[womenofkwmc]

Of 100 companies in the Science, Technology, Engineering, and Maths sectors, just 13% of Board Directors are female. Women make up only 3% of advertising agency Creative Directors despite women accounting for 85% of all consumer purchases. Unsurprisingly, 91% of women, in one survey, said that advertisers didn’t understand them.

[womenofkwmc]

The percentage of teenage females depicted with some nudity on screen has increased by 32.5% from 2007 to 2012. Last year a survey found 6 in 10 teenagers had been asked to send sexual images and videos, and 1 in 4 teenagers had sent sexually explicit text messages.

[womenofkwmc]

At least 75% of mothers have primary responsibility for childcare in the home. Up to 30,000 women are sacked each year simply for being pregnant and each year an estimated 440,000 women lose out on pay or promotion as a result of pregnancy.

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Lets start thinking about who we are supporting with our purchases: Women control $12 trillion of the overall $18.4 trillion of global spending and women influenced $90 billion dollars worth of consumer electronic purchases in 2007. We have the power to make and break businesses.

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Just 17% of all technology jobs in the UK are held by women and perhaps unsurprisingly just 1% of women think tech manufacturers have them in mind when designing products.

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70% of new businesses are started by women. It is estimated that the UK would gain up to £23 billion by better harnessing women’s skills in employment.

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Women consistently volunteer more than men and 87% of employers think that volunteering can have a generally positive effect on career progression for people aged 16-25.

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In 2012 girls out-performed boys in obtaining A* - C GCSEs in Science, Technology,  Engineering, and Maths subjects, yet in 2012 just 29% of girls studied physics at A level and only 6.5% of girls sat the 2013 Computing A Level.