Gender Equity Lecture Series | Faculty of Math
A Way Forward?: Dispositional Barriers to Gender Equity
Conversations about gender equity can be challenging. Not only are there lots of ways that gender inequities can manifest, often making the discussion fractured and complicated, but the personal responsibilities each of us have for collective injustice, and the important real-life impacts of gender inequity can make productive dialogue fraught with dispositional barriers to success.
In this faculty specific lecture, Students, Staff and Faculty will hear from Dr. Jamie Sewell who aim's to create some common conceptual ground upon which more productive conversations and work toward gender equity can be built. This lecture will make clear some candidate theories of gender and why investing in the idea of a gender binary is both ethically and empirically problematic. We will also explain the importance of taking an intersectional approach to solutions to gender inequity, and identify some of the most important dispositional barriers to successfully addressing gender inequities.
Meet the presenter
Dr. Jamie Sewell (she/they) is a queer, feminist epistemologist, and a first-generation student. Dr. Sewell holds both an M.A. and Ph.D. in philosophy where she's contributed to democratic education theory, applied ethics, and philosophy of law. She has been teaching at the University of Waterloo since 2015, in both the Philosophy and the Gender & Social Justice Departments, and is a Senior Training Specialist in the Office of Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Anti-Racism. Dr. Sewell founded and, in its first year, co-directed the University of Waterloo chapter of Minorities and Philosophy — an international organization that seeks to connect with and support marginalized philosophers at all levels.
About the Gender Equity Lecture Series
This lecture series is intended to highlight some significant personal, interpersonal, and systemic barriers to gender equity across the University of Waterloo's campus, and explain some of the harms of gender inequity, when it arises. In addition, this series aims to explore foundational concepts in gender theory, implicit bias, epistemic ignorance, systemic oppression, and more. Ultimately, this series is intended to help develop shared epistemic resources, such that we can all better understand how gender inequity can manifest, and work toward mitigating its effects on our community.