|
The Bloom team is on holiday for a few weeks to rest and come back to you better than ever :) For our final newsletter of the year, we took a break from our usual format and instead put together a Year in Review with positive and powerful moments around the world for women’s rights and gender justice. These are, by no means, all the most pivotal moments of 2020; what they are, true to who we are at The Bloom, is those small seeds of joy, some perhaps overlooked in big media outlets, and others that made it to the front page for maybe a day or two, only to be totally lost in seas of headlines. We felt it was important to bring these stories back, reanimate them for you, for us, as a reminder of all the progress made this year, and to take this inspiration, hope, and joy with us into 2021.
And finally...A few weeks ago we sent out our first ever annual subscriber survey to learn more about you and how we can improve the newsletter. Thank you again to everyone who participated; we're so grateful and *motivated* by your responses!!! We'll be sharing some of our interesting finds, along with the winners of the two prizes, in January when we return to you. 🖤
with love and light,
Jasmine
|
|
🎉Victory for the woman behind one of the biggest equal pay cases in the UK: Samira Ahmed wins her equal pay claim against the BBC.
🦋Internationally celebrated beauty YouTuber comes out as a transgender woman in an emotional video: Nikkie de Jager, a Dutch YouTuber in the Netherlands, shares her transition story for the first time with over 12 million followers.
👪A public official in Japan takes paternity leave for the first time in history.
|
|
✊🏿A 13-year-old black activist shares a powerful message on racial injustice in room full of elite white professionals and politicians: This year marked the 50th anniversary of the World Economic Forum’s flagship meeting of the world’s business/political elites in Davos, Switzerland. What stood out most from the conference is a powerful speech by American gun control activist Naomi Walder.
⚖️India's first law school for rape survivors helps women take the law in their own hands.
🧵Women in Chile use traditional embroidery to urge political change: As millions of Chileans take to the streets calling for change, some women turn to the arpillera, a form of artistic protest dating back to the dictatorship era where scenes of tragedy or protest are embroidered onto scraps of burlap.
🏍 3,500 women from 79 countries, 6 continents, and a year of riding: The Women Riders World Relay celebrates the end of its year long trip around the world, inspiring greater equality among motorcyclists.
🛹Afghanistan's all-girl skateboarding school becomes the subject of an Oscar-nominated documentary.
|
|
🌳Greta Thunberg appears on the cover of the Rolling Stones' special issue on the climate crisis, reminding us in her interview of an underestimated side of "strength" and what it means to be powerful – "I'm very tiny and I am very emotional, and that is not something people usually associate with strength. I think weakness, in a way, can be also needed because we don’t have to be the loudest, we don’t have to take up the most amount of space, and we don’t have to earn the most money...We need to care about each other more.”
🚀NASA astronaut Christina Koch shares in her first interview back from space what it's like being a woman in space, after breaking the world-record for longest single spaceflight by a woman with a total of 328 days in space.
📊UN Women celebrates the 25th anniversary of the first World Conference on Women in Beijing (1995) with the release of a fantastic report giving an overview on progress, gaps, and challenges related to the advancement of gender equality and women’s rights globally.
|
|
🏛South Korea's first feminist party seeks parliament seats: South Korea is regularly ranked lowest in the developed world for gender equality, but for the first time a feminist party sought parliamentary seats, accusing the political establishment of having failed women.
🚙The all-female robotics team in Afghanistan who made a cheap ventilator out of Toyota parts.
|
|
🙅🏽♀️Major win for women's rights in Sudan with the criminalisation of female genital mutilation (FGM): Sudan’s new government outlaws the practice of FGM, a move hailed as a major victory by women’s rights campaigners in a country where the dangerous practice is widespread.
🏹Skeletal damage hints some hunter-gatherer women fought in battles. Sexual divisions of labor characterised ancient societies, but were not as rigidly enforced as has often been assumed.
📱#DateciVoce trends across social media in Italy, with women demanding greater representatiion and public voice in the country's fight against covid-19.
|
|
✊🏿Women of color in US reach historic wins in government as nation protests systemic racism: As the US remains gripped by widespread protests against police brutality and systemic racism, black and Hispanic women win elections in multiple states, with significantly improved rates from 2016 elections.
🏳️🌈In a six-three vote, the conservative-leaning bench of the US Supreme Court declared that federal law prohibits job discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or transgender status.
🎤Notable Black women speak from the Instagram accounts of white women around the world as part of the #ShareTheMicNow campaign: a group of nearly 50 Black female activists, entrepreneurs and celebrities spoke from the IG accounts of white women.
|
|
👠Sex work network emerges in Argentina to save lives during covid-19: A life-saving grassroots movement emerged in the country to support sex workers ignored by the government.
🚇A new project launches to change London's iconic tube map by renaming 270 stops after women and non-binary people who have shaped the city.
👙Valentina Sampaio becomes first transgender model to appear in Sports IIllustrated’s swimsuit issue.
|
|
🕊Three women give hope to Belarus and stand against Lukashenko, one of the world's most authoritarian leaders, in a challenge that symbolizes the electorate's hunger for change.
⛵️300 women set off on all-female voyage to hunt for pollution hotspots.
📸British Vogue's cover story features notable activists from around the world who are tackling issues from systemic racism to disability discrimination and domestic abuse, gender inequality to the climate crisis.
|
|
💥Feminist activists take over Mexico Human Rights Office in protest of the national femicide crisis, and use art as a weapon by painting over all-male portraits of historical figures hanging in the building.
🕌German court sides with Muslim women teachers over discriminatory headscarf ban.
🎨A poster campaign begins in France to spotlight the country's femicide crisis: Names of 122 women murdered by men over the past year in France were plastered onto a Paris wall as part of a memorial to mark the first year of a poster campaign by “les colleuses” (the gluers).
🕶Kenyan comedian Elsa Majimbo begins to gain global recognition for her comedy sketches on Instagram, providing a global audience some much needed comedic relief amid mass isolation and lockdowns.
🕯A new domestic violence law in Kuwait signals hope for women.
🖋After Afghan women asked #WhereIsMyName, a small victory: Afghan citizens’ national identification cards have long included the name of card holder’s father; now they will also note the name of the citizen’s mother.
👁Dozens of Iranian women of various backgrounds take to social media to propel forward Iran's #MeToo movement.
|
|
🧬Two women, Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna, win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their work on the genome-editing tool CRISPR. This is the first time women scientists have won the award without a male collaborator.
✊🏿Women lead Nigeria's #EndSARS protests.
🏳️🌈Belgium appoints Europe's most senior transgender politician.
🕊UN Human Rights Council adopts historic resolution to protect women's human rights in humanitarian settings.
🖼A hotel celebrating female empowerment opens with more than 60 artworks highlighting the achievements of women. One of The Bloom's favorite pieces is a mural of Ruth Bader Ginsburg composed of 20,000 hand-painted tampons.
🚽NASA finally built a toilet for women.
🌱Before the world knew what intersectionality was, scholar, writer and activist Angela Davis was living it, arguing not just for Black liberation, but for the rights of women and queer and transgender people. And in a new interview, Davis expresses a relaxed optimism about the US' direction.
|
|
🎉Kamala Harris makes history as the first woman, the first Asian American, and the first Black American to be elected vice president.
🏹Young Thai women lead pro-democracy protests, take inspiration from Hong Kong demonstrations and...The Hunger Games.
📚New study shows how just one educational session about menstrual hygiene can make a difference for young women.
🌈New Zealand elects most diverse cabinet in the country's history.
🇧🇷In Brazil’s first elections under Bolsonaro, Black women are fighting back – and winning.
🎥A new wave of Korean filmmakers are tackling sexual violence through cinema, pushing what many are calling a “female film new wave.”
💡Professor and radical Black feminist in US writes article that goes viral on a different approach to activism, posing the now widespread question: "What if instead of calling people out, we called them in?"
|
|
🌾Women power protests in India against detrimental farm laws, demand greater equality and visibility.
⚖️China's #MeToo gets its moment in court.
🌷Vulvani, a menstrual education platform, creates the first-ever free database with period related stock photos.
🎆BBC hosts a 5-hour livestream extravaganza for a day of useful and entertaining "how-to" global masterclasses by women with incredible personalities like Africa's music queen, Angélique Kidjo, Chilean rapper, Ana Tijoux and 'electrofeminist' Madame Gandhi.
🔑Argentina's lower house of Congress approves a landmark bill to legalize abortion.
|
|
|
|
|
