Bessie Watson Lecture Theatre

Some of the graphics installed in the Bessie Watson Lecture Theatre, designed by Gillian Kidd. Photo credit: Lauren Johnston-Smith.

 

Information Services hosted a number of events to celebrate International Women’s Day this year. The day began with the opening of the Bessie Watson Lecture Theatre in the Outreach Centre at Holyrood Campus. The lecture theatre was named after child suffragette and piper, Bessie, as part of our tradition of naming new teaching spaces after pioneering women (see Naming Spaces After Inspirational Women).

The lecture theatre had wall-to-wall graphics depicting Bessie and telling a little of her story. The graphics were designed by Gillian Kidd, a graphic designer in the Learning, Teaching and Web directorate. This artwork also includes a timeline which showcases a number suffragists and suffragettes who had a connection to the University of Edinburgh. This features the likes of Elsie Inglis, David Masson, Lila Clunas and of course, Bessie herself.

Following the opening ceremony of the Bessie Watson Lecture Theatre, Dr Melissa Highton (Director of Learning, Teaching and Web) hosted a workshop on menopause in the workplace.

She talked about why menopause is a workplace issue and presented the statistics on the impact of not providing support for the women going through menopause. In fact, one in ten women have left work due to symptoms of the menopause, according to the Menopause and the Workplace report by the Fawcett Society. This may be yet another leaky pipeline, losing women when they are at the heights of their careers.

One of the fans handed out at the Menopause in the Workplace workshop. Photo credit: Lauren Johnston-Smith.

The workshop facilitated many great discussions on the current policies and legislation and why it’s so important to retain some of the most experienced people in the workforce.

The attendees of the workshop also received a lovely, colourful fan, to keep them cool in the office (see photo).

Ewan McAndrew (Wikimedian in Residence) and Ellie Whitehead (Assistant Wikimedian in Residence) hosted a Wikipedia edit-a-thon in the afternoon of International Women’s Day. This event trained staff to edit and add articles to Wikipedia, with the aim of increasing the number of articles about women on Wikipedia.

These edit-a-thons are part of the Women in Red project, which aims to address the gap between men and women on Wikipedia. In late 2014, only 14% of biographies on Wikipedia were about women. The Women in Red project has helped bring this number up to 19.7% in 2024. This, however, is still much too low.

This workshop went some of the way to close this gap, adding 23 new articles to Wikipedia throughout the event. These articles were about a number of pioneering women, from Laura Lundy to Wahida Amiri.

In the week running up to International Women’s Day, Mahima Aggarwal (Diversity Attraction and Recruitment Intern) ran a social media series on LinkedIn called “Women in ISG“. This series featured some of the many women working in Information Services and gave them space to talk about their experiences as a woman in tech.

The percentages of female staff in LTW since 2020.

The four women featured this year were:

• Jasmine Patel, Digital Preservation Intern
• Shivani Rao, Digital Safety Officer
• Delia Georgescu, Service Manager
• Kat Neumann, Service Co-Ordinator

These remarkable women discussed their diverse career paths, some of the challenges faced by women in tech, and their thoughts on working in ISG.

This series also celebrated Learning, Teaching and Web reaching gender parity this year, with 50% of the staff being women. This follows continued efforts to encourage the recruitment and retention of women in the tech-based directorate.

(Graphic by Mahima Aggarwal, Diversity Attraction and Recruitment Intern)

International Women’s Day 2024 / PlayFair Steps by blogadmin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution CC BY 3.0