The organizers of the event, the newly founded Gender Equality Research Institute (Inštitut za proučevanje enakosti spolov – IPES) and student association for international relations Globallis opted for the fish-bowl format, which leaves two panel seats empty in order to have members of the audience actively join the panel guests.
CEEMAN President Danica Purg was joined by Jasna Murgel, member of the Slovenian National Assembly, Divna Brkić Hendrickx, director of Kliping d.o.o., Maja Voje, head of marketing at OriginTrail, and Katja Cimermančič from the newspaper Finance.
The panel covered a wide range of areas in which gender inequality remains a pressing issue and discussed corresponding solutions, such as the merits of gender quotas and introducing more possibilities for paternity leave. Both the panel guests and the audience agreed that pluralism and gender balance in the workplace – no matter at which level – have benefits for companies, education institutions and other organizations, most prominently because an increased presence of women in areas dominated by men is likely to have a positive and diversifying impact on agenda setting.
The need for legislative change was also highlighted in the discussion about violence against women, however intangible things such as gender norms and perceptions that cannot be tackled with such measures were also pointed out. Sharing an anecdote about the ways in which girls and boys often start being treated differently at a very early age, Prof. Danica Purg stressed the importance of introducing change from the very beginning of an individual's education, and how teachers and educators need to be taught how to integrate the notions of gender equality, creativity and empathy into their work.
