At the office of gender equality

Thursday, 5th of July

On Thursday, July 5th, 2018, we were able to start our day by sleeping in for an hour! At 10:00am, we met at the City of Zurich’s Office for Gender Equality. This office is located in city hall, which is a large building with beautiful art and modern décor. The goal of this office is to promote equality within Zurich, specifically for men and women, as well at the LGBTI community. They do many different activities and projects for the citizens of Zurich, focusing specifically on education, careers, family and work, gender and violence, and LGBTI. Our presenter, Shelley Berlowitz, also told us about the office’s 4-year Gender Action Plan, focusing on achieving a balance of genders within several important aspects of the city, such as education, research, work, and more. After our visit, we headed back to ZHAW to hear the presentations by Swiss student, Anna and American student, Rachel.

Both presentations focused on the topics of gender, sex work, and LGBTQA. Before we started our discussion, students had many questions about different topics we presented, and we spend a good amount of time answering questions and discussing. After this, we started our discussion with the idea of regulating sex work. Most people agreed that it should be regulated by the law for the safety of the workers, though there was much discussion about what regulation is necessary and how that regulation should be implemented. Finally, we talked about what could be done to change the gender gap in the workforce, as well as in everyday life. We spent so much time talking about these two questions that we unfortunately ran out of time and were not able to discuss the third question. During these discussions, we discovered that there is much left to do for gender equality in both Switzerland and the United States.

After class, a few students walked around Old Town, some went bar hopping, and others went back to their homes to prepare for Friday! Overall, we had a great day!