Week Five: Women in Politics

For our last week (unfortunately!) of Young Feminists Club, we had to go out with a bang! So while we ate yummy Ian's Pizza, we discussed Women in Politics. We went over the unequal representation of women in Senate and the House of Representatives, with 21% and ~19% of each being made up of women, respectively. We discussed how women politicians are perceived differently due to their gender and how this is evident in the media. To illustrate this, we talked about how passionate women are often perceived as "angry" and how their clothing is widely scrutinized, while a male politician's outfits are almost never discussed. We were lucky enough to have another guest speaker, Brianna Koerth, who ran Hillary Clinton's campaign on the UW campus in Madison! She told us about her work to try to get more women running for elected offices, her internship in DC, and the important impact women can and will have in politics. After asking her a few questions about if she had met Hillary (of course she had!) and about any hardships she faced in her work based on her gender, we worked on activity to allow the students to voice their political concerns. Each student wrote a letter to either Senator Tammy Baldwin, Senator Ron Johnson, or President Donald Trump. We had some insightful notes that both criticized and thanked these political representatives, sometimes even offering their own suggestions for change. Our last week of The Young Feminists Club was an awesome one and we are bittersweet watching our project come to an end.