Allyship Journey

Welcome to the Day 1 of the Allyship Journey!

Our world is on fire. We see riots, polarization, fights with the police or the military. We can see an uproar of resistance from so many places and we don’t always understand why and what is our role in it. How can we have the proper conversation we need to have without offending anyone? How can we truly respect all the people in our organizations? How can we make a concrete change?

Well, in order to change a system, we first need to understand it, not only the symptoms but also the root causes.

Because the personal is political. Anything happening in our lives is also a reflect of the system we live in. And I do believe that in order to improve a situation, we first have to name what is not working.

Today, we live in a social system which is called patriarchy.

Patriarchy or rule of the father is a system where men hold primary power and predominate in roles of political leadership, moral authority, social privilege and control of property.

We live in an economic system which is capitalism, based on the private ownership of the means of production and their operation for profit. Capitalism is based on private property rights, profit, and competition.

The first thing we need to understand is that these systems are pretty recent. Capitalism is about 500 years old and accelerated with the industrial revolution and patriarchy is about 5 to 6.000 years old.

Before that, people were living in tribes, collecting fruits, killing wild animals to survive. Contrary to a common idea, prehistoric times were not patriarchal per se. Men would go hunting and women would collect food and take care of babies, but this separation of tasks did not mean that they had different values or that one was more powerful than the other.

This is what has been introduced by patriarchy and later capitalism: a ranking of people according to their economical value.

Patriarchy appeared progressively for different reasons.

First, men realized their role in human conception. They understood the link between sex and birth.

Then, in the book “The Creation of Patriarchy”, Gerda Lerner explains how agriculture, domesticating animals, sedentarism led to the emergence of private property, tools and cattle owned by men.

As productivity increased, with the use of animal power and the introduction of bronze tools, economic surplus also increased. So, it became possible to accumulate wealth instead of having to consume everything produced.

It was now of the utmost importance to control the sexual life of women to be sure your son was actually yours and thus protect your inheritance.

From there originated the importance of female virginity before marriage and faithfulness during.

The marriage contracts became economical contracts, a way to gain land and more property.

And slavery became a way to own people to make even more profit.

During the Antiquity, the works of Aristotle already portrayed women as morally, intellectually, and physically inferior to men; saw women as the property of men; claimed that women's role in society was to reproduce and to serve men in the household; and saw male domination of women as natural and virtuous.

Already 300 years before Christ, the Greek society was functioning according to a hierarchy called the Human chain of being. God / Man / Women / People of Color/ Children / Nature. So deeply embedded in our psyche is this vertical hierarchy among beings.

Progressively we evolved from an economy of subsistence, an economy allowing us to produce and consume the goods we needed, to an economy of property and accumulation. We produced more and more technical tools.

And this happened mostly at the cost of others. Expropriating farmers from their lands to build vast properties. Invading other territories to ensure that we own more natural resources, enslave more people to gain free workers, produce more than we can consume in order to accumulate more wealth and capital.

The system needed more and more compliant producers willing to work to create wealth for someone else, while receiving only a small proportion for themselves in the form of wages.

And we started using not only other human beings but also the nature as an infinite resource that solely belonged to us.

In her book “Caliban and the Witch”, the Italian feminist Silvia Federici considers the killing of witches as foundational of a capitalist system that domesticates women, imposing on them the reproduction of the workforce as forced labor without any remuneration. Europeans then invaded the American continent, killing 75 Million people, about 95% of the local population. Since there were no more people to actually cultivate the land, free labour was imported from the African continent allowing Europe to accumulate even more wealth.

The scientific revolution is also seen by many ecofeminists as heralding the era in which women, as well as nature, came to be dominated, controlled and exploited. All natural wisdom known by indigenous people or rural women was destroyed and taken back by white male doctors or scientists.

All these past events led to the current system, mostly vertical, hierarchical, a pyramid where a few old the power over a vast majority of others. It is the domination system Riane Eisler describes in her book “The chalice and the blade”.

It is characterized by:

- Authoritarian and inequitable social and economic structure

- High degree of abuse and violence

- Subordination of women and femininity to men and masculinity

- Beliefs and stories that justify and idealize domination and violence

The whole challenge of diversity and inclusion is to make it more horizontal and collaborative. Imagine the challenge. It will not happen in one day. It requires a complete shift in the mindset.

And it is especially hard because the system is invisible, like the Matrix. The UK activist Carolina Criado Perez says: “Patriarchy is invisible, You are living in it every day but you don’t see it.”

So now we know in which system we live in, what is systemic oppression?

Systemic oppression refers to the mistreatment of people within a specific group, supported and enforced by the society and its institutions.

Systemic oppression exists at different levels which interconnect.

At Interpersonal level: This refers to prejudices and discriminatory behaviors where one group makes assumptions about the abilities, motives, and intents of other groups based on their origin. You assume that overweight people are lazy, that rural people are uneducated, that students of color are not “college material.” Your assumptions might influence your grades if you are a teacher, your promotion process in your organizations…

At Internalized level: Members of stigmatized groups, who are bombarded with negative messages about their own abilities and intrinsic worth, may internalize those negative messages. It holds people back from achieving their fullest potential. It is the imposter syndrome, thinking that you are never good enough.

At Institutional level: Institutional discrimination occurs when organizations, businesses, or institutions like schools and police departments discriminate, either deliberately or indirectly, against certain groups of people to limit their rights. This type of discrimination reflects the cultural assumptions of the dominant group. For example, a discipline policy that correlates to a disproportionate number of African American boys being sent out of class.

Finally at Structural level: This refers to the accumulation over centuries of the effects of a discriminating society. Think again about the creation of the white middle class and what it means today to have been left out of that process of wealth-creation, home ownership, college education, etc.

During this whole process, we have unconsciously integrated many unspoken hierarchies:

• White superior to People of Colour

• Men superior to Women

• Adults superior to children

• Human beings superior to Nature

• Heterosexuals superior to gay or trans people

• Able-bodied superior to any less able body

• Slim superior to fat

• More educated superior to less educated

• Urban superior to rural

• Extroverts superior to introverts

• “Mentally healthy” superior to “mentally ill”

• Catholics superior to Islam (and others)

• Individual superior to collective

The competitive nature of the system, and the constant need to grow and expand often has often led to military conflict and war, as capitalist interests compete for control of markets, trade routes and natural resources both inside and outside their national borders. This is called Imperialism, extending a country's power and influence through colonization, use of military force, or other means.

As a conclusion, without rigorous examination, behavior is reproductive.

By default, current practices, cultural norms and institutional arrangements foster and maintain inequitable outcomes.

To undo systemic oppression, we must forge multi-ethnic, multi-cultural, multi-lingual alliances and create democratic processes that give voice to new organizing systems for humanity.

EXERCISE: For the duration of this Allyship journey, I engage you to take a notebook or a journal where you can start to write down your key learnings. After each video, I will ask you a few questions to reflect upon during the coming days. For this first video, I would like you to write down your reactions. Did you feel triggered by what I explained? What were the thoughts and emotions you had?

Time for thought. Have a great rest of the day!

Welcome to the second day of the Allyship journey! Today we will talk about the first way the system perpetuates itself: through stories, myths, and narratives.

Joseph Campbell in his book “The power of the Myth” explained how myths give us life models. For example, it is proven that in the cultures that have a female at the origin of the creation, males actually take more part in the caretaking. So myths are not disconnected from the reality, they really inspire it.

This is the core of Harari’s provocative thesis in his book Sapiens: It is our collected fictions that define us as a specie and lead us to cooperate. If we collectively decide to alter the myths, we can alter population

At the moment, most of the stories and myths present in our society back up the current domination system and justify the superiority of the dominant collective. Think about the sacrifice of his beloved son by Abraham in monotheist religions embodying obedience to authority above love and empathy.

Alternative myths or narratives have been destroyed or looked down upon as primitive or foolish, as most indigenous stories for example.

And tales favouring the dominant have been created in its place, such as Disney’s Pocahontas. John Smith wrote about how the beautiful daughter of a powerful native leader rescued him, an English adventurer, from being executed by her father. This narrative of Pocahontas turning her back on her own people and allying with the English, thereby finding common ground between the two cultures, has endured for centuries. This narrative is very flattering to the dominant culture and conveys the myth of the “good Indian”, the one who admires the white man, admires Christianity, marries him rather than one of her own.

Religions also have a key role in shaping the different archetypes, as they did with the original sinner, Eva or the pure Mary in the Bible.

Mythology tells us what is acceptable: the rape of the Sabines as the creation event of Rome, Zeus raping most goddesses and humans show us that rape is a collateral damage of the domination system. Grand paintings of Europeans looting the world, or greatest heroes being male white conquerors and imperialists such as Napoleon or Alexander the Great, show us that conquering land even at a terrible human cost is worth remembering.

This is what is called centering. The idea that the whole reality is explained through the dominant’s perspective and its view of the world. All the stories that do not involve the dominant or portray him in a positive light disappear.

Who heard of the Dahomey Amazons in Benin, a powerful all female military regiment?

And who heard of La Kahina, a Berber queen and a religious and military leader who led indigenous resistance to the Muslim conquest of the Maghreb in the 7th century? Who Heard of Queen Nanny, a Jamaican national hero, leader of the Maroons in the 18th century? Who knows Rigoberta Menchú, a current indigenous activist and leader from Guatemala?

We need to decolonize our knowledge to rediscover myths and heroes or heroines from other cultures and other value systems.

Another iconic example of the centering is the celebration of Columbus day on the 12th of October, Spain national holiday, a blank holiday in the US to celebrate “the discovery of the Americas” when most Native people consider this date as the start of a cultural genocide. Thanksgiving Day is often portrayed as beginning with a friendly feast attended by American settlers and Native Americans, ignoring the centuries of genocide, racism, and discrimination that followed.

Another example of centering is that most of the world, Christian or not is counting the date from the birth of Jesus Christ. Some cultures have their own calendar (muslims, orthodoxs, Chinese...) but the common acknowledged measure of time is based on a judeo-christian date.

In France or in Spain, many public celebrations still reenact the victory of Christians against Muslims.

This centered narrative is reinforced by the news we watch, the movies we see, the books we read, …

Recently, a lesbian French author said she would only read books written by women from now on. It triggered an uproar. But what have been reading, watching, listening to so far?

The cultural industry is extremely biased towards the dominants narrative because the dominant has money to finance it.

The rest of the narratives is invisible. So it doesn’t exist.

The narrative of colonization from the Indian perspective, of slavery from the African perspective, of crusades from the muslim perspective. The story of the world from the point of view of women, trans people, indigenous people, introverts, people on the autism spectrum, …. Is rarely making the news.

A lot of critics now complain of the whitewashing of non-white heroes in Hollywood movies. The fact that, even when the movie industry is starting to tell the stories of non-white people, they hire white actors to represent them. For example, Cleopatra, the famed ancient Egyptian ruler is to be played by Israeli actress Gal Gadot, best known for her Hollywood depictions of Wonder Woman. In the past, white actors used blackface to portray Black characters, such as Laurence Olivier playing the Black moor Othello in 1965.

Religious art and films have been whitewashing the Bible for centuries. Although Jesus, Moses, and other biblical heroes were born in the Middle East, they’re usually depicted in paintings, movies, and other media as being White, often with blue eyes such as Michelangelo’s David.

Schools also teach a whitewashed version of history, one in which White cowboys are the heroes, Indians are the villains, and slavery is a minor blemish rather than a massive permanent scar. The main movers and shakers are rarely not White. And we remember George Washington and Thomas Jefferson as icons of achievement and nobility while failing to mention that both owned slaves.

Many of the news favour a whitewashed version of events that emphasized White protesters and law enforcers with little focus on the Black communities driving the story and most affected by it. Whitewashing in the news is also evident in the underreporting of unarmed Black men injured and killed by White police and in the way Breonna Taylor’s murder was swept under the proverbial rug until the Black Lives Matter protests finally made it trending news.

Rock and roll has long been defined by White talent taking credit for Black art. The genre itself is based on blues music, a Black art form, yet it still took White artists like Elvis Presley, or the Rolling Stones to popularize music that originated with Black performers by whitewashing it for mass White consumption. This is what is called cultural appropriation, when the dominant adopts the fashion, iconography, trends, or styles from another culture and benefits from it financially or aesthetically.

And kids learn to see white as good and beautiful from a very young age, would it be with the iconic blonde, blue-eyed, sculpted to European-descended perfection Barbie or fairy tales like Cinderella or Goldilocks. In her TED talk “The danger of a single story”, the Nigerian Author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie explains how she started reading stories about snow and apples as being the norm, even if she had never seen any.

In our ads, we do not see women wearing hijab or people from Asian descent.

In our cities, the statues in the public squares, the names of the streets show us that only the dominant narrative deserves recognition. Only 2% of the French streets are named after women. And only now do we see that some statues are taken down and some cities try to balance their streets names.

As the famous phrases says, You can’t be what you can’t see.

UN Women says that only 23% of the movies have a female protagonist at the moment. And most of them still follow what is called the male gaze, portrayed from a male heterosexual perspective, where female are mostly objects of desire.

You can perform what is called the Bechdel test. It’s a very simple test, where you need to have two female characters in the movie who have a name and who actually talk to each other about something else than a man. Guess what? Half of the movies don’t pass the test.

When we belong to non dominant collectives, getting to know our role in history is actually key to our emancipation. We need to know about all the leaders, warriors, queens, sailors, pirates, adventurers, artists, writers that are absent from our narratives. We need to know their struggle and fill our imagination with them.

Reflection time: Think about the stories in your country about gender, race, sexual orientation, about other ethnic groups, other religions, other countries, other social class…

What do they say? What are the stories that are untold? Invisible?

And how do you try to diversify the stories you watch, you read, the songs you listen to?

Let us know!

Welcome to the day 3 of our Allyship Journey!

Today we will talk about the words because language is a way that the power structure is conveyed. Words matter. They actually shape our world.

First, most of our languages are actually androcentric. They consider masculine as universal.

We can see that in different expressions, like mankind, manpower and different professions that are already associated with a gender.

Look at some expressions like “Hey guys” when we address a group of mixed people or sometimes even women. Even if people do not mean it, as women, we are not even included in the words that describe the reality. We are completely erased from it. This is really deep into our psyches and our way of understanding the world.

There is a new trend towards inclusive writing but it is still a minority. In Spanish, French, the presence of only one male person in the group transforms the whole collective in masculine. At language level, masculine overpowers feminine.

And beyond this, think about so many sexist expressions running in our language, “don’t be a pussy”, run like a girl, hysterical, feminazi and so on.

Language shapes our world. Most of it comes from our sexist, racist and homophobic worldview.

Saying that somebody is a black sheep is just an example of how racism is so subtly built into the English language that most of us don’t notice. Yet, the outcast is not the white sheep.

Everyday language reminds Black people that their color is related to extortion (blackmail), disrepute (black mark), rejection (blackball), banishment (blacklist), impurity (not the driven snow), illicitness (black market), and death.

Then we have the power of the jokes. Making fun of overweight people, people with disabilities, people who are deemed “different from the norm”. And all the insults that attach value and courage to men and make assumptions on the sexuality of your mother as women.

The accent is also a way to classify you, between urban and rural, well educated and less educated, wealthy or less wealthy social class. On TV, only what is considered “standard” accent is allowed. Your language level is also a way to identify which social class you belong to.

In some cases, it is even forbidden to speak your native language, as was the case for Catalans for example during the 40 years of Spanish dictatorship.

Or the mapuches who do not teach their language to their kids so that they are not discriminated socially.

The words we use when reporting news also matter. Domestic homicides are often portrayed as “kind” men who just “snapped” or crimes of passion. Victims of sexual assault are “alleging” or “claiming” facts instead of reporting, implying there is a doubt in their testimonials.

Finally, the use of the speaking space and time is also a demonstration of power.

A dominant individual often talks confidently and assertively, and tends to give orders and instructions. Their voice is self-assured, and they won’t hesitate to raise it if doing so will help them get their own way. Their physical stance and body language is also very assertive, and suggests that the space belongs to them. In public transportation, this is called manspreading. People from the dominant group tend to have an assertive body language, with open shoulders, stand taller, look at people in the eyes.

Those who have a dominant personality tend to impose their point of view, which they consider to be the most relevant, on others. Because of this, they can’t handle criticism. They tend to either turn on the charm to gain support for their vision or use intimidating behaviour such as threats, guilt trips, mood swings or humiliation.

People with power and privilege tend to express it through their voice:

· Making noise when they arrive somewhere so that people note their presence

· Speaking louder

· Interrupting others or manterrupting

· Finishing the phrases of others

· Occupying the speaking stage in meetings / groups

· Speaking non stop without a pause so that they are not interrupted

· Monopolizing the conversation with their topics

· Explaining others what they probably already know or mansplaining

· Calling others with condescending names (sweetie, cariño…)

· Not listening

· Appropriating others’ ideas

· Shouting / Insulting

· Throwing things

· Slamming doors / objects

The words are also in favour of the extroverts personality. In her book, “Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking”, Susan Cain explains how the leadership model in many organization is unconsciously in favour of the extrovert type of personality.

At least one-third of the people we know are introverts. They are the ones who prefer listening to speaking; who innovate and create but dislike self-promotion; who favor working on their own over working in teams.

In Quiet, Susan Cain argues that we dramatically undervalue introverts and shows how much we lose in doing so. She charts the rise of the Extrovert Ideal throughout the twentieth century and explores how deeply it has come to permeate our culture.

What do we do in our teams to listen to the introverts?

To conclude, the ultimate way to maintain the system of oppression is actually the absence of words. The fact that we are silent when there is abuse of power, when somebody is making a classist joke, when a colleague is interrupting another one, when somebody is making an appropriate comment at the dinner table, only perpetuates the current oppression.

Exercise:

As an exercise today, I invite you to a living experiment. Whenever you are in a group, would it be at work or talking with some friends or at dinner, just note who is speaking, try to monitor the speaking time, the different interventions, the frequency, the interruptions. Who is invading and who is retreating? And at the end, voice your stats. Make people realize and think about what is going on.

Another journaling exercise for today is to see how you want to challenge your own language.Which expressions, which words do you want to stop using?It can be insults or just the way of speaking but which is the commitment you’re taking to try to have a more inclusive language?

Welcome to the day 4 of our Allyship journey.

Today we will talk about the roles of stereotypes in our romantic and sexual lives. This topic seems very personal and not really relevant in a professional context but the system does not stop at our bedrooms’ door.

Our attraction to other individuals is not only determined by our biology but also by what is considered attractive in our culture.

First, heterosexuality has been considered the norm.

This is what is called Heteronormativity, the belief that heterosexuality, is the “normal” mode of sexual orientation.

Today, above 70% of the population in Canada, US; Argentina, Philippines, or Western Europe say that homosexuality should be accepted by society.

But this numbers drop to only 9% in Indonesia, 13% in Lebanon, 14% in Russia, or 37% in India.

In sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, Russia and Ukraine, few say that society should accept homosexuality.

Religious affiliation also plays a key role in views towards acceptance of homosexuality. Different religious stories such as Sodoma and Gomorrha detail God’s wrath towards homosexuality and condemn it explicitly. Increasing numbers of politicians and church leaders have been stirring homophobia to rally bases and provoke fear among voters in Eastern Europe.

It is only 30 years that “homosexuality” was declassified as a disease and in many countries or families, people are sent to conversion therapy. The therapy, now banned in many countries and some states in America, promises the impossible of “changing people’s sexualities” often with cruel and inhumane tactics.

It's still illegal to be LGBT+ in 70 countries, and you could be given the death penalty in 12 of them. Most condemn mostly male homosexuality with this double standard considering that female homosexuality as either not a thing or not a criminal act.

Only 65% of those living in UN countries around the world can now be, legally, in consensual same-sex relationships.

There are currently only 29 countries that allow same-sex couples to marry.The latest country to pass legislation is Costa Rica, which became the first Central American nation to allow same-sex marriage on May 26, 2020.

So we see that in terms of sexual orientation and tolerance, there is still a long way to go.

Let’s share a few definitions that could be useful.

LGBTQIA+ is an acronym that stands for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, Queer, Questioning, Intersex, Asexual, with the '+' signifying Aromantic, Pansexual, Polysexual and any other identity along the gender and sexuality spectrum. The idea is to show that our sexual orientation and our gender can be extremely diverse.

Asexuality is the lack of sexual attraction to others, or low or absent interest in or desire for sexual activity.

Pansexuality is sexual, romantic or emotional attraction towards people regardless of their sex or gender identity.

Non-binary is a spectrum of gender identities that are not exclusively masculine or feminine‍ – they sit outside of the gender binary of female/male. People who identify as such, don’t conform to traditional gender norms, and may go by pronouns ‘they/them’. Asking someone their preferred pronouns – and stating your own – is one way to be inclusive of all gender identities.

Originally meaning 'strange' or 'peculiar', the word queer was used throughout the 20th century as an insult towards people who had same-sex desires or relationships. For many, it still carries the weight of that adverse history. Whereas, for others, it has been reclaimed, especially since the queer rights movements of the 1980s. Today, more often than not, ‘queer’ is seen as a positive identifier for those within LGBT+ communities.

Cis gender are people whose sense of personal identity and gender corresponds with their birth sex.

You have a penis and you identify as a male, you have vagina and you identify as a female, then you are cis-gender.

If you do not identify to the sex given at your birth, you are transgender. Transgender might be prescribed hormones or undergo surgery but transgender identity is not dependent upon physical appearance or medical procedures.

Before the 1980s, the few representations of homosexuality in popular culture tended to consist of potentially dangerous social deviants (think Norman Bates in Psycho). Since then, however, the portrayal of gay characters in pop culture have become far more numerous and mostly positive with shows as Pose or Hollywood.

The International HIV/AIDS Alliance estimates a worldwide prevalence of men who have sex with men between 3 and 16%.

An estimated 3.5% of adults in the United States identify as lesbian, gay, or bisexual and an estimated 0.3% of adults are transgender. There are around 9 million LGBT (lesbian, gay bisexual and transgender) Americans.

71% of LGBTQ youth reported experiencing discrimination due to either their sexual orientation or gender identity. Trans people also experience higher rates of discrimination and harassment than their cisgender counterparts and, as a result, experience poorer mental health outcomes. They are also at a greater risk for suicide as they are twice as likely to think about and attempt suicide than LGB people.

Insults, jokes, or physical harm are still pervasive. Homicides, hangings and even lynching of trans and gender diverse people are still happening all around the world. 331 trans and gender diverse people have been killed in 2019. The majority of the murders happened in Brazil, totalling 130. However, Mexico had 63, and the United States saw 30. 61% of the deaths have been in the sex workers.

2 in 3 American LGBTQ youth have reported that someone tried to convince them to change their sexual orientation or gender identity. Of the LGBTQ young people who have been through conversion therapy, their likelihood of attempting suicide doubles. 57% of transgender and non-binary youth who have undergone conversion therapy report a suicide attempt in the last year.

15% of young lesbian, gay and bisexual people will try to take their life, compared to 29% of young trans people. LGBTQ youth is over four times more likely to attempt suicide than their peers.

The system is not only prescriptive in terms of sex and love life for LGBTQ community.

Heterosexual people are also supposed to follow the unspoken norms. In many countries, women have to be virgin before marriage. Or faithful during.

Dominant macho men have been portrayed in the movies and books as the model little girls shall be patiently waiting for. We have danced to Everybreath you take, I’ll be watching you or

Blurred lines, I know you want it. We have sang many reggaeton songs, Eres mia, mia, Obsesión etc… justifying control, stalking, shaming, guilt-trips for women.

We have also been conditioned by the image of romantic love on what to expect from our love lives. Toxic and abusive relationships are still portrayed as passion in many movies or series.

We have been raised in a culture that is teaching men to be independent, strong, emotionless, and putting their needs first.

And little girls are taught to bond and relate and that love is everything, ithe solution to all their problems. Women are taught to be of service, to put their needs second and to do all the emotional work in the relationship or the family.

So no wonder that when we grow up, there is inequality in our emotional lives. Tinder has recently been accused of having a sexist algorithm for matching younger and less educated women to older, more educated and rich men, to have better chances of matching.

This imbalance is also present in the economic situation. In many countries still, it’s an economic reality that a woman has to get married to actually survive, would it be because she is not able to work or because the shame would be too strong in the culture to be single after a certain age.

And the fertility window is an additional pressure to find a partner.

So, yes, the romantic world is definitely not a balanced one.

And this is a cause of tremendous pain because for many women, it is necessary to choose between our freedom, our independence and being loved. When love is actually a common emotion and a universal need.

Shulamit Firestone in her book “The dialectic of sex” is even more radical. She says that love is actually the pivot for women’s oppression. It’s what has been keeping women subordinate for all this time.

Because this dedication to make the relationship work in an unbalanced world is absorbing our energy and our power. Imagine if instead of thinking about how to make the relationship work or to keep the guy that really doesn’t want to be kept, you would dedicate your fire to create, have fun, rest or change the world? It would be such a different place. Shulamit Firestone also says that the creativity that men have, the work that they are doing is actually feeding on our love. Women give so much emotional support that men can go out there and create. Write, paint, talk, develop their careers, based on all the emotional support that we provide and it’s terribly unfair because there are very few women out there who benefit from the same level of emotional support that would definitely help us to shine even more.

And the imbalance is even more present in the sex life, Sex is actually taboo in many places around the world. It’s so taboo that we actually know nothing about it. In France, a recent study showed that one teenage girls out of four did not know that she had a clitoris. Imagine.

Sex is also a place for spreading many false beliefs. For example, the idea that men have a strong and irrepressible sex drive while women are not so much interested by sex. As well, we tend to believe that loose women are dangerous for society.

This led to blaming and shaming women who might have sex before marriage or who had a too loose sexuality according to standards. Shaming girls who show too much of their bodies as a potential threat. It meant also cutting the clitoris of millions of girls, at the moment 125 Millions of women and girls in the world, to separate them from pleasure and experiencing joy during sexual encounter and cheating on their husbands. It means cutting on funding on family planning and abortion. And of course funding so many Viagra options or pornographic movies that are definitely more focused on male pleasure than female one.

So these beliefs are really widespread in our societies. No wonder that we are talking about the orgasm gap. Did you know that actually, in heterosexual relationships, men reach orgasm 95% of the time while women reach orgasm only 65% of the time. And we can say: It’s because it’s more difficult for women to reach orgasm. Actually not. Because when we talk about same sex relationships, women reach orgasm with the same percentage as men. So it’s really about how we are making love and how we consider sex.

Exercise: Did you experience this imbalance in your love life? Have you ever been in a toxic and controlling relationship? How did you feel? How safe is it for you to explore your sexual orientation?

Welcome to the day 5 of the Allyship Journey!

Today we will talk about the role of money and private property in maintaining the system.

In a capitalist system, money is at the base of everything. It allows us to pay for goods, to possess our own homes, to cover our children expenses, to ensure next generations are protected. So it is key for our future.

Yet, as individuals, we are not paid the same. According to UN Women, worldwide, women only make 77 cents for every dollar earned by men.

In the US, American Indian, Alaska Native, black and Hispanic women earn 25 percent less than white men. White women earn $0.81 for every dollar a white man earns.

Women in the EU earn on average 16% less per hour than men. Still, there are huge differences between the EU countries.

The gender pay gap ranges from less than 8% in Belgium, Italy, Luxembourg, Poland and Romania to more than 20% in Czechia, Germany, Estonia and United Kingdom.

The gender wage gap in India is the highest in Asia, with women on average paid 34 per cent less than men for performing the same job with the same qualifications.

In Latin America and the Carribean, women earn on average 26 percent less than their male peers.

And given the fact that women earn less, have less property and live longer, the majority of the world’s poor are women.

So your sex and your ethnicity have a strong influence on the way you are paid.

But it’s not only this.

It is your capacity to get a loan, to get trusted by bank authorities, to get a mortgage, to inherit from your parents and so on and so forth.

Three quarters of the world’s population cannot prove they own the land on which they live or work. Female farmers lack equal rights to own land in more than 90 countries. So on average, Women own less than 20% of the world's land.

Women in many countries face legal barriers preventing them from inheriting property.

As an example of this systemic wealth gap, let’s focus on the US case with this study from Mac Kinsey:

Only about 40 percent of black families own a home, compared with 73 percent of white families. When black families do own homes, their homes are less likely to appreciate in value—and they appreciate more slowly when they do.

Black families’ housing options have been historically limited through the National Housing Act of 1934 to those in D-rated neighborhoods, which are characterized by distressed housing stock, lower-income residents, and overall decline.

45 percent of black children attend high-poverty schools, nearly six times the rate of white children. Growing up in such schools lowers children’s probabilities of graduating from high school and attending college, crucial ways to increase earning potential. As a result, only 24 percent of the black population over the age of 25 holds a bachelor’s degree or higher, ten percentage points lower than the comparable white population.

Black workers are unemployed at twice the rate of white workers, black workers who hold bachelor’s degrees experience a rate of unemployment similar to that of white workers with no college education.

Only 8 percent of black families receive an inheritance, compared with 26 percent of white families which means that black families are 1.3 times more likely than white families to have student debt.

And black college graduates’ wealth actually declines after graduation because they are more likely than white college graduates to support their parents financially.

Black consumers are 73 percent more likely than white consumers to lack a credit score. This results in a credit-denial rate on loans that is twice the rate of those for white consumers.

This is a good example on how systemic, intersecting barriers limit the wealth building of minorities. You cannot get healthy and wealthy on your own if the whole system is rigged.

This results in a growing wealth inequity in the world.

According to Oxfam, the world’s 2,153 billionaires have more wealth than the 4.6 billion people who make up 60 percent of the planet’s population.

The 22 richest men in the world have more wealth than all the women in Africa.

On the other side,

ALMOST HALF OF HUMANITY IS LIVING ON LESS THAN $5.50 A DAY.

THE UNPAID CARE WORK DONE BY WOMEN IS ESTIMATED $10.8 TRILLION A YEAR - THREE TIMES THE SIZE OF THE TECH INDUSTRY.

These rising inequalities are benefiting the wealthiest. Top income tax rates have fallen in all countries, which have made tax systems less progressive. In wealthier countries, the top income-tax rates have dropped from 66% in 1981 to 43% in 2018.

And the income gap has been exacerbated by the climate crisis. The gap between the richest and poorest 10% of the global population is 25% larger than it would be in a world without global warming.

So, your access to wealth is completely determined by your sex, your ethnicity, your social class and we do not start this race on an equal foot.

Exercise: What is your current wealth level? Did you inherit any money? Did you pay for your own study? Are you in debt? Do you have savings? Investment? What can you do to develop your financial power?

Welcome to the day 6 of our Allyship journey!

Today, we will talk about the centering present in the design. Design of our buildings, our cities, our services, our clothes, our technology.

First of all, our world is designed for abled bodies.

The most recent World Health Organization estimate suggests that roughly a billion people—fifteen per cent of humans—live with disability. Disability is, itself, normal. Nor is it a fixed identity: as infants, we are all dependent, and many of us pass through phases of disability throughout our lives, after surgery or during sickness, or as we age. The word has a fluidity that is often denied.

In her book “What Can a Body Do?: How We Meet the Built World”, Sara Hendren explains how furniture and tools, kitchens and campuses and city streets are built with the able body in mind.

A disability is any condition of the body or mind that makes it more difficult for the person to do certain activities and interact with the world around them.

Disability is extremely diverse. It can be physical or mental. It can be visible or invisible.

It can be physical impairment, sensory impairment, cognitive impairment, intellectual impairment mental illness, and various types of chronic disease.

Disability can affect:

• Vision

• Hearing

• Thinking

• Learning

• Movement

• Mental health

• Remembering

• Communicating

• Social relationships

People with disability report seeking more health care than people without disability and have greater unmet needs. For example, a recent survey of people with serious mental disorders, showed that between 35% and 50% of people in developed countries, and between 76% and 85% in developing countries, received no treatment in the year prior to the study.

People with disability encounter a range of barriers when they attempt to access health care including the following:

· Prohibitive costs. 51-53% of people with disability are unable to afford health care compared to 32-33% of people without disability.

· Limited availability of services: research in Uttar Pradesh and Tamil Nadu states of India found that after the cost, the lack of services in the area was the second most significant barrier to using health facilities.

· Physical barriers: Uneven access to buildings (hospitals, health centres), inaccessible medical equipment, poor signage, narrow doorways, internal steps, inadequate bathroom facilities, and inaccessible parking areas create barriers to health care facilities. For example, women with mobility difficulties are often unable to access breast and cervical cancer screening because examination tables are not height-adjustable and mammography equipment only accommodates women who are able to stand

· Inadequate skills and knowledge of health workers. People with disability were more than twice as likely to report finding health care provider skills inadequate to meet their needs, four times more likely to report being treated badly and nearly three times more likely to report being denied care.

Ableism is a set of beliefs or practices that devalue and discriminate against people with physical, intellectual, or psychiatric disabilities and often rests on the assumption that disabled people need to be 'fixed' in one form or the other.

Ableism is:

• Failing to incorporate accessibility into building design plans

• Buildings without braille on signs, elevator buttons, etc.

• Building inaccessible websites

• Using disability as a punchline, or mocking people with disabilities

• Refusing to provide reasonable accommodations

• The eugenics movement of the early 1900s

• The mass murder of disabled people in Nazi Germany considered a financial burden to society.

But what about ‘everyday’ or minor ableism? What does that look like?

• Choosing an inaccessible venue for a meeting or event, therefore excluding some participants

• Using someone else’s mobility device as a hand or foot rest

• Framing disability as either tragic or inspirational in news stories, movies, and other popular forms of media

• Casting a non-disabled actor to play a disabled character in a play, movie, TV show, or commercial

• Making a movie that doesn’t have audio description or closed captioning

• Using the accessible bathroom stall when you are able to use the non-accessible stall without pain or risk of injury

• Wearing scented products in a scent-free environment

• Talking to a person with a disability like they are a child, talking about them instead of directly to them, or speaking for them

• Asking invasive questions about the medical history or personal life of someone with a disability

• Assuming people have to have a visible disability to actually be disabled

• Questioning if someone is ‘actually’ disabled, or ‘how much’ they are disabled

• Asking, “How did you become disabled?”

What are ableist micro-aggressions?

Micro-aggressions are everyday verbal or behavioral expressions that communicate a negative slight or insult in relation to someone’s gender identity, race, sex, disability, etc. In the case of ableism:

• “That’s so lame.”

• “You are so retarded.”

• “That guy is crazy.”

• “You’re acting so bi-polar today.”

• “Are you off your meds?”

• “It’s like the blind leading the blind.”

• “My ideas fell on deaf ears.”

• “She’s such a psycho.”

• “I’m super OCD about how I clean my apartment.”

• “Can I pray for you?”

• “I don’t even think of you as disabled.”

Phrases like this imply that a disability makes a person less than, and that disability is bad, negative, a problem to be fixed, rather than a normal, inevitable part of the human experience.

Many people don’t mean to be insulting, and a lot have good intentions, but even well-meant comments and actions can take a serious toll on their recipients.

Able-bodied privilege assumes that everyone can see, walk, hear and talk, for example, constructing environments around these “non-negotiable” attributes. However, it is obvious that not everyone can see, walk, hear or talk, and as a result, those with specific weaknesses are set at a disadvantage.

From this, individuals who identify as able-bodied obtain certain privileges in society, such as having a world constructed for individuals who can walk up stairs. While we assume that buildings have always had stairs, we have easily forgotten that buildings were and continue to be designed for one particular body, one with two “functioning” legs.

Our world is typically built for affluent, white, and able-bodied, adult males. It’s a sound idea to design for a default, a typical customer. But when you’re ignoring up to half of the potential audience, your default may not be so standard in real life, right? People of all shapes and colours need to see themselves reflected in all aspects and layers of society. We need inclusive design.

Because today Our design is based on WHITE abled bodies.

Have you ever thought why Nude products are surprisingly beige, from bandages to shoes, makeup, and lingerie showing that white is the norm?

Not only is our world designed for abled bodies, it is designed for white abled male bodies.

Once again the story is centered on what is considered the norm. The one size fits all.

In her book “Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men”, Caroline Criado Perez gives different examples:

· The Toilets and the inevitable queue: women take up to 2.3 times as long as men to use the toilet. Women make up the majority of the elderly and disabled, two groups that will tend to need more time in the toilet. Women are also more likely to be accompanied by children, as well as disabled and older people. Then there’s the 20–25% of women of childbearing age who may be on their period at any one time, and therefore need to change a tampon or a sanitary pad. Women may also require more trips to the bathroom: pregnancy significantly reduces bladder capacity, and women are eight times more likely to suffer from urinary-tract infections. In the face of all these anatomical differences, equal floor space between men and women is definitely not inclusive design.

· Car crashes. Men are more likely than women to be involved in a car crash. But when a woman is involved in a car crash, she is 47% more likely to be seriously injured, and 17% more likely to die. And it’s all to do with how the car is designed – and for whom. Cars have been designed using car crash-test dummies based on the “average” male, 1.77m tall and weighs 76kg. It wasn’t until 2011 that the US started using a female crash-test dummy.

· The AC. Most offices are five degrees too cold for women, because the formula to determine their temperature was developed in the 1960s based on the metabolic resting rate of a 40-year-old, 70kg man; when women’s metabolisms are slower.

· The average smartphone is too big for most women’s hands, and it doesn’t often fit in our pockets. Speech-recognition software is trained on recordings of male voices: Google’s version is 70% more likely to understand men.

· Clothes for women are hurtful and limit their movements: from high heels to bras, from corsets to the absence of pockets, the design of women’s clothes has been based on their sexiness to the male gaze more than the comfort of the person wearing them.

But this is not only the design of physical products, it is also the way digital media and technology is designed.

Algorithms are actually automated decisions.

In “Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism”, Safiya Umoja Noble explains how many people regard Google as neutral, like a library. However, Google is not neutral: it is a huge commercial corporation which is motivated by profit. The ranking system used by Google leads people to believe that the top sites are the most popular, trustworthy and credible. In fact, they may be those owned by the people most willing to pay, or by people who have effectively gamed the system through search engine optimisation (SEO).

Ranking is itself information that also reflects the political, social, and cultural values of the society that search engines operate within.

Women make up just 11% of software developers, 25% of Silicon Valley employees, and 7% of partners at venture capital firms. Bytes may be neutral, but programmers are often – wittingly or unwittingly – biased. And this influences the design of our whole futures.

That is why we need diversity in the tech space and not only gender diversity but also neuro diversity!

Neurodiversity refers to the different ways the brain can work and interpret information. It highlights that people naturally think about things differently. We have different interests and motivations, and are naturally better at some things and poorer at others.

Most people are neurotypical, meaning that the brain functions and processes information in the way society expects.

However it is estimated that around 1 in 7 people are neurodivergent, meaning that the brain functions, learns and processes information differently. And this is mostly invisible and poorly diagnosed.

Neurodivergence includes Attention Deficit Disorders, Dyslexia, Dyspraxia and Autism. Most forms of neurodivergence are experienced along a 'spectrum'.

ADHD affects the person's ability to control attention, impulses and concentration, and can cause inattention, hyperactivity and impulsiveness. It is estimated that about 4% of the population have ADHD.

Dyslexia it is estimated that 10% of the population are dyslexic. it is a language processing difficulty that can cause problems with aspects of reading, writing and spelling. they may have difficulties with processing information quickly, memory retention, organisation, sequencing, spoken language and motor skills.

Dyspraxia. it is estimated that up to 5% of the population are dyspraxic. It relates to issues with physical co-ordination, and for most, organisation of thought. people with dyspraxia may appear clumsy or have speech impediments and might have difficulties with tasks requiring sequencing, structure, organisation and timekeeping.

Autism impacts how a person perceives the world and interacts with others, making it difficult for them to pick up social cues and interpret them. It is estimated that about 1-2% of the population are autistic.

Nevertheless, the neurodiverse population remains a largely untapped talent pool. Unemployment runs as high as 80%

Most college grads with autism can't find jobs. In the US, 85% of college grads affected by autism are unemployed, compared to the national unemployment rate of 4.5%.Two-thirds of young people with autism had neither a job nor educational plans during the first two years after high school.

Although neurodiverse people may excel in important areas, many don’t interview well. For example, autistic people often don’t make good eye contact, are prone to conversational tangents, and can be overly honest about their weaknesses.

Yet, Neurodiversity is a competitive advantage.

In the last decade, large companies, particularly technology companies realized their special skills in pattern recognition, memory, or mathematics to solve highly complex problems.

Often, neurodiverse talent who possess above average intelligence and special talents in memory, pattern recognition, and mathematics are most suited to do this type of work.

Employees in neurodiversity programs typically need to be allowed to deviate from established practices. this shifts a manager’s orientation from assuring compliance through standardization to adjusting individual work contexts.

Most companies would have to adjust their recruitment, selection, and career development policies to reflect a broader definition of talent.

SAP has pledged to hire adults with autism for 1% of its workforce and we can see TV shows as Atypical or Love on the spectrum giving a different image of neurodiversity to wider audiences.

Exercise: Let’s reflect on design. When have you been affected by non inclusive design? Analyse your building. Your home. How accessible is it? What can you do to improve it? Do you have any neurodiverse person in your organization? Which adjustments have you done so that this person feels more included?

Welcome to the day 7 of our Allyship journey!

Today we will talk more specifically about our bodies. We live in a society that is designed for, caters to and praises small bodies. We see it in the size of an airplane door, the weight capacity of a chair, the ease of slipping into a restaurant booth, access to comfortable and fashion forward clothing. These daily challenges may have never come across your radar, unless you have lived in a larger body.

People in larger bodies (i.e. people who wear plus sizes) face consistent, systemic oppression that makes it difficult or impossible to find clothes and spaces that fit, healthcare that’s effective and non-discriminatory, equal access to employment.

According to WHO, Worldwide obesity has nearly tripled since 1975.

Around 2 billion adults are overweight, 39% of the adults.

13% of the adults or 650 million people are obese.

Overweight and obese children and adolescents have risen dramatically from just 4% in 1975 to just over 18% in 2016.

Obesity and overweight are caused by our alimentation style (energy-dense foods high in fat and sugars) and the increasingly sedentary nature of many forms of work, changing modes of transportation, and increasing urbanization.

These systemic change towards intensive agriculture and food processing have dramatic health impacts.

The constant bullying, reminders and comments fat people receive have led to a multi-billion dollar diet industry that preys on people, especially women, to find insecurities with their appearance, the things they eat or their decision to stay active or not. Diet culture is a consequence of fatphobia.

Historically, White women were supposed to practice discipline to keep their bodies slim and to look as ‘lady-like’ as possible in comparison to the fat, Black women who they thought were savages.

Even people (mostly women) who are just 10 or 20 pounds overweight are often fat-shamed on social media sites.

The belief that “fatness” equates with laziness or lack of self-control remains pervasive today. Obese people are stereotyped as being “lazy, incompetent, unattractive, lacking willpower and to blame for their excess weight”.

Overweight people are less likely to be hired, are lower paid, have fewer opportunities and are often outright bullied in the workplace. And, as these stories and studies reveal, women bear the brunt of the discrimination

Body shaming is defined as inappropriate negative statements and attitudes toward another person's weight or size. There are negative attitudes in the media and elsewhere about celebrities who are "too fat" or who have not gotten rid of "baby weight" in an appropriate amount of time. And people might not realize they benefit from “thin privilege”, when sitting comfortably in train and plane seats are things some people take for granted.

Beyond body size, attractiveness is also another surprising privilege. We’re taught at a really young age that ugly equals bad and hot equals good. Cinderella’s wicked step sisters were made to be ugly and undesirable.

Attractiveness is mostly defined as facial and body symmetry; proportional anatomy, height (particularly among men); a full set of straight, white teeth; a full head of hair; clear, evenly-toned, taut, skin; a well-toned physique; proportional features; large eyes.

Hotness isn’t just a privilege, it is in some ways the ultimate privilege.

It transcends other social hierarchies.

First, hot people are more desired romantically. But the advantages of good looks go far beyond finding a mate.

Attractive people are more likely to be seen as competent and be hired for a job.

They are perceived as smarter, more trustworthy, kinder. They are more likely to benefit from acts of kindness from a stranger. They have greater self-esteem. If you're running for office, you might fare better if you're good-looking. If you're attractive, strangers might assume you have a happier life.

Children who are perceived to be more attractive are treated with more respect and admiration from adults and peers alike.

All this pressure on looking thin and attractive leads to exponential aesthetic procedures, in 85% of the cases for women.

The most popular surgical cosmetic procedure worldwide in 2017 was breast augmentation, followed by liposuction and eyelid surgery. The most popular nonsurgical procedures included botulinum toxin, or botox, hyaluronic acid, hair removal, and photo rejuvenation.

Top 3 countries being the US, Brazil (10% of the procedures worldwide) and Mexico (4.5%).

The pressure is also on what women wear. Recently, French education minister advised female teenagers to dress in a “republican way” after some young women were expelled from school for wearing a crop-top.

From the recent burkini rulings in the south of France to the news that women in Iran are forced to cut off their hair and disguise themselves as men if they want to leave the house without a hijab – not to mention the ongoing insistence that rape victims should tell juries what they were wearing before their attackers are found innocent – society is still bafflingly obsessed with the way women cover up.

Finally, one of the latest discrimination on our bodies is ageism, stereotyping on the basis of age. Employers often have negative attitudes towards older workers, especially older women.

Consumerism urges us all to “fight” ageing as if it were a battle we could win, even though we know in our hearts that’s a lie. Mantras like “70 is the new 50” emphasise the need to be vigorous and vital for as long as possible, yet offer no alternative scenarios for those with degenerative diseases, loss of cognition or suffering from loneliness. Shame and fear create markets for skin-care and pharmaceutical companies.

Only 12% of speaking characters in Hollywood movies are 60 and up. And many are portrayed as impaired. Ageism is believing that wrinkles are ugly and that it’s sad to be old. It’s prejudice against our future selves. It’s calling adult women Miss as a praise. It’s lying about your age at your birthday or considering asking a woman’s age as a lack of respect. It’s believing that aging enhances men and devalues women. It’s assuming we are too old to do something or date someone.

By 2050, almost 2 billion people, one out of five of us will be age 60 and up.

Let’s remember that all isms are socially constructed ideas, we make them up, so they can change over time.

All the prejudice we have about different collectives are extremely present in the healthcare system.

Medicine, as a site of social power, reflects the contours of power in society at large, and patriarchal values are prevalent in healthcare provision as a structural trend.

Medical experimentations on enslaved women or people of colour have led to reduced trust in physicians and medical research within communities of colour.

Women are still often perceived as “reproductive beings, which leads to non-reproductive health problems being under-researched and under-diagnosed, while reproduction is over-medicalized.

For example, while there have been significant advances in artificial reproductive technologies, non-reproductive health issues that are important to women’s well-being or pleasure, such as menopause and female orgasm remain under-researched.

Female participants have long been excluded as research subjects leading to lacunae in specificities of disease in females. Health conditions which affect both sexes can manifest in particular ways in female patients (e.g., anaemia, osteoporosis, cardiovascular disease), rendering standard treatments suboptimal or unsafe. Likewise, pharmaceuticals whose safety and efficacy are inferred from studies on male patients are sometimes unsafe and/or ineffective for female patients.

Gendered inequalities in healthcare are also widely reported in clinical encounters, as physicians make assumptions about women’s health based on gender stereotypes about pain thresholds and patient credibility, while drawing on male-centred research and guidelines. Women’s pain reports are often discredited or their pain inappropriately attributed to mental health issues

Black patients are less likely to receive treatments for myocardial infarction than white patients, with Black women faring worst of all, with the highest resultant mortality rate.

Obstetrical and gynaecological violence is a form of violence that has long been hidden and is still too often ignored. In the privacy of a medical consultation or childbirth, women are victims of practices that are violent or that can be perceived as such.

Some gynaecologists can be judgemental, patronising or even uncooperative, holding specific views on family planning or abortion. Remember that modern medicine emerged from a strong patriarchal uprising which resulted in the witch hunts. The system has been anti-women from its very inception.

Centuries of female exclusion has meant women’s diseases are often missed, misdiagnosed or remain a total mystery such as the 10% of reproductive aged women affected by endometriosis worldwide who take on average, seven-and-a-half years to be diagnosed from first symptoms.

Around the world, an alarming number of women and girls with disabilities have been, and continue to be, denied these rights through the practice of forced sterilization.

This violence towards non dominant collectives is also present in the field of mental health.

Feminists have been taken to task for suggesting both that the higher level of mental illness observed in women is a consequence of the oppression they face - an oppression which drives them into madness and mental disorder - and also that the concept of mental illness is a social construct inappropriately and incorrectly applied to women by a patriarchal order as a means of social control.

In her book, “Women and Madness”, Phyllis Chesler argues that women, and especially women of colour, are negatively impacted by psychiatry and psychology due to the dominance of men in those fields and the misunderstanding of the systemic oppression the patient is going through.

Depression, anxiety, suicidal thoughts are often diagnosed as individual issues that require pharmaceutical treatment without acknowledging the systemic violence surrounding the person. According to Mayo Clinic, depression is diagnosed twice as much in women as in men. But depression is actually a symptom of powerlessness. When you feel powerless, when you are oppressed in a domination system, you develop coping mechanisms. And mental illness or depression can actually be one of them.

In most countries having money is a passport to better health and a longer life, while being poor all too often means more sickness and an earlier grave. People from poor communities can expect to die ten or twenty years earlier than people in wealthy areas. In developing countries, a child from a poor family is twice as likely to die before the age of five than a child from a rich family.

EVERY DAY 10,000 PEOPLE DIE BECAUSE THEY LACK ACCESS TO AFFORDABLE HEALTHCARE.

EACH YEAR, 100 MILLION PEOPLE ARE FORCED INTO EXTREME POVERTY DUE TO HEALTHCARE COSTS.

As a reflecting exercise: What is your personal situation? Do you consider yourself attractive? Have you ever been confronted to fat-shaming or ageism? Have you experienced sexism or racism in your healthcare treatment? Did you report it? Have you ever postponed a medical treatment for lack of money?

Welcome to our day 8 of the Allyship journey!

Today we will talk about implicit biases in the justice and police system.

First, let’s understand unconscious bias.

Basically, our brain has the capacity to make rapid decisions. This is extremely useful, especially to recognize a potential threat. This is what has often saved our lives as human beings. This capacity to rapidly analyze a situation and decide what to do.

But in a non-threatening situation, this part of our brain is active too. So I make automatic associations. Linked to what I have heard in my family, in my society, in my history classes, in the books, in the movies, in the newspapers.

I judge. Instinctively. I meet a stranger. I judge. I make assumptions. I imagine. According to what the person looks like, the way she speaks, dresses, moves with her body.

Fast. Good. Bad. I like. I don’t like.

And we all do it, let’s be very honest. We don’t say it because we know it’s not PC, we know we are supposed to be good non-judgemental people but we all do it.

We say: I am colourblind. I don’t see race. I don’t see gender. But this is a lie. You see the colour of the skin of people. You hear the accent in their voice. You see difference. Pretending you don’t is denying the problem, not solving it.

And we especially do it, when we recruit, manage or promote people. Blind auditions are said to increase the proportion of female players hired by orchestras to nearly 50%.

Think about the first seconds you saw me on these videos, what were your assumptions about me? Is she nice? Annoying? How old is she? Where is she from? Is she single? Married? Is she educated? Is she homosexual? What are the cues that you got from the past videos?

Because one tendency is to feel more comfortable with people who look like us, speak like us, studied where we studied, belong to the same social class, have the same skin colour. We suppose we will understand ourselves better. It will be faster. And we will not be challenged.

If you can, take your journal and stop this video after each of the following questions.

What is the first thing that comes to your mind when you see or hear:

- A man with a high-pitched voice and typical feminine gestures?

- A female pilot in your airplane?

- A transgender person?

- A woman wearing a hijab or a niqab?

- A TV anchor with a provincial accent?

- An old indigenous woman in the street?

- A person in a wheelchair?

- People speaking in sign language?

These unconscious implicit biases are also at play in our police and justice system. LGBTI people around the world are subjected to routine harassment and abuse by police. In France, young men perceived as North African or Black are 20 times more likely to be subject to identity checks. Overwhelmingly, the people stopped by the police in the US were Black and Latino, and physical force was used half the time.

Racism and other forms of discrimination are built into law enforcement and justice systems around the world; from racial profiling and discriminatory police checks, to selective enforcement of drug policies and broad application of anti-terror laws.

Following the introduction of emergency laws in France in 2015, police carried out thousands of discriminatory raids and house arrests, mostly targeting Muslims. Police burst into mosques, forced open doors, and sometimes handcuffed or pointed firearms at people, some of whom were targeted solely on the basis of their religious beliefs.

In 2017, authorities in the Russian republic of Chechnya unleashed a wave of attacks on people believed to be gay or lesbian. Dozens of gay men in Chechnya were abducted and tortured. Many were killed at secret detention sites.

In the Dominican Republic, sex workers, and especially trans women who are sex workers, face appalling abuse at the hands of police including rape, beatings and humiliation.

Police brutality is used to refer to various human rights violations by police. This might include beatings, racial abuse, unlawful killings, torture, or indiscriminate use of riot control agents at protests.

In the US, Black people have been 28% of those killed by police in 2020 despite being only 13% of the population. Black Americans are up to 3.5 times as likely to be killed by police. 98.3% of killings by police from 2013-2020 have not resulted in officers being charged with a crime.

According to Amnesty International, in 2019 police in Rio de Janeiro, in Brazil, killed 1,810 people - an average of five per day.

In her documentary 13th, Ava du Vernay explains the systemic oppression of black people through the prison system in the US. 33 percent of the incarcerated population is black, almost triple the black citizens’ share of the US population. The overwhelming preponderance of images of black men as criminals on local news and shows stoked fear in Americans. “So, you have been educated in public, deliberately, over years, over decades, to believe that black men in particular, and black men, in general, are criminals,”

The violence in the justice and police system at institutional level is also present at personal level.

It is the famous one in three.

One in three women around the world will be raped, beaten, coerced into sex or otherwise abused in her lifetime.

This is the famous iceberg of jokes, micro aggressions, benevolent sexism or racism progressively leading to assaults and murder.

It is estimated that 35 per cent of women worldwide have experienced either physical and/or sexual intimate partner violence or sexual violence by a non-partner (not including sexual harassment) at some point in their lives.

The likelihood of perpetrating physical violence was more than three times higher among men who had witnessed their fathers beating their mothers during childhood than those who did not

58% of feminicides are killed by intimate partners or family members, meaning that 137 women across the world are killed by a member of their own family every day.

This is called the silent war. And it does not contemplate the mental, verbal or emotional abuse present in so many relationships. In Pakistan, UN studies show that while 50% of women are physically abused in relationships, over 90% are mentally or verbally abused by male figures surrounding them. This abuse includes yelling, name-calling, blaming, shaming, isolation, intimidation and/or any controlling behavior that ultimately chips away at a woman’s feelings of self-worth and independence.

It is a habitual pattern of demeaning verbal offense and excessive criticism. In many cases, women are confined to toxic relationships and are unable to escape due to the fear of being stigmatized by the society or ostracized by their community. Abuse is not limited to visible wounds on a woman’s body. Like depression, the pain inflicted by psychological abuse is invisible, yet just as potent (if not more). The scars left on the mind do not fade as easily as the scars left on the body.

Sexual abuse is also rampant. 1 out of 5 minors suffers sexual abuse before 17 and 60% receive no help. With the trauma and the PTSD it supposes. france 250 rapes every day

And bullying is becoming more and more pervasive, would it be in our physical or virtual lives.

Living in a domination system means for a large majority of the population enduring constant violence or fear of violence. In general, minorities have poorer health and health outcomes than the dominant collective.

Exercise. Have you been suffering from violence in your life? At physical, or emotional level? From family members, teachers, students, partners, police? What has been the impact on your physical and mental well-being?

Welcome to day 9 of the Allyship journey!

Today, we will talk about the impact of all the systemic oppression on the non-dominant collectives.

As a minority, your options are limited.

Either you stand out with the risk to get criticism, exposure and attention or you fit in, you keep your head down, you stay invisible, safe. Either you adopt the dominant culture or you are excluded by it. Either you assimilate, you forget your own culture to integrate into society, you play the “good minority” or you face the risk to be offered less opportunities.

Either you become the oppressor, or you are rejected by the system.

Either you change yourself, or you are poor and invisible.

Either you change your hairstyle, your accent, you whiten your skin, you undergo esthetic surgery, you are docile, you silence your pain.

Or you take the risk of being seen as a “problematic” minority, an angry one.

Both have a tremendously high price.

That is why a lot of minorities repress their anger.

In her book called “Rage becomes Her”, Soraya Chemaly explains how anger has been at the heart of so many experiences for women, and other minorities.

The whole collective is actually telling women and girls to actually control their anger, to not express it and, little by little, we learn to express our needs and our frustrations without sounding angry or demanding or bitter. Because we have to be nice. All the time. And this has a huge emotional price. Because swallowing anger means that this repressed emotion is actually targeting your mind and your body. We talked already about depression and mental illness. Girls try to commit suicide and think about committing suicide twice as much as boys do. And on physical health, women experience way more physical pain than men do. For example, we have different illnesses that are directly linked to unexpressed rage, such as certain types of cancer and especially breast cancer. So we can see that this repression of women’s anger is actually impacting us and making us suffer.

Anger is a positive emotion. It’s an engine, it’s an emotion that is connected to justice and to social change. It’s because you feel that there is a real imbalance and injustice going on around you, It’s because that you feel that your needs are not met that you actually feel angry. So instead of trying to shut it down and shush it as much as you can, how can we express it in a healthy and powerful way that is useful for us and for the world?

Because, Every day, you are basically reminded that you do not belong. And that you do not belong because you are not worth to belong. In the workplace, prejudice can manifest in benevolent ways, but it still hurts. And the dominant collective often ask the minority to “explain” to them the racism or sexism or discrimination in place, requiring them to do once again all the emotional work.

Every day, through the stories that do not represent you, the jokes that make fun of you, your mere presence is questioned.

This is what is called a micro-aggression. Research has shown that microaggressions, although they're seemingly small and sometimes innocent offenses, can take a real psychological toll on the mental health of their recipients. This toll can lead to anger and depression and can even lower work productivity and problem-solving abilities.

Plus, they can affect a work or school environment, making it more hostile and less validating and perpetuate stereotype threat (the fear of confirming existing stereotypes about one's group, which can have a negative impact on confidence and achievement).

All these expressions are micro-agressions that have an impact on our psyches and how we feel about ourselves. Many studies show that women and girls develop low self-esteem from puberty onwards. So from the adolescence, from the moment that girls get into schools, they actually lose self-esteem and confidence instead of gaining it. We see that parents convey the image to young girls that they are more vulnerable, that they need to be protected, that they are limited in their movements at night for example or outside or in their travel because the world out there is dangerous for them and they ought to be protected.

If you can’t voice our anger, you internalize it and target it towards our own bodies and minds. As part of the domination system, we often use a language that is representative of this idea of power over.

So we bully ourselves, we insult other people, we criticize, we blame, we judge, we rank. And this is all stemming from the idea that there is a hierarchy between us.

Minorities develop more self-hate. We are our own oppressors, insulting ourselves, judging ourselves, criticizing ourselves constantly. And this violence is in all the communication modes that we have with ourselves and with the rest of the world.

It is what we call Internalized inferiority

• Carry internalized negative messages about ourselves

• Believe there is something wrong with being who you are

• Have lowered self-esteem, sense of inferiority, wrongness

• Have lowered expectations, limited sense of potential for self

• Have very limited choices: either ‘act in’ (white) or ‘act out’ (disrupt)

• Have a sense of limited possibility (limited by oppression and prejudice)

• Cycles through generations

EXERCISE:
What about you? Do you tend to fit in or stand out? Which micro-aggressions have you witnessed? Towards you or others? How did you react? Which intergenerational trauma runs in your family? How does it impact you?