Members of a group for female minority students said the organization established a space on campus exclusively for female students of varied cultures to discuss their experiences.
Executive board members of GW Women of Color, an organization launched in September to unite women of different ethnicities, said members hosted events every other week during the academic year like a women’s history night, a professional panel of minority women in the workforce and open table discussions about minority students’ challenges in the classroom. Group leaders said they focused their events on discussions around a “broader” identity of being a minority woman in everyday life.
Rising sophomore Taarika Gopinath, the organization’s community chair, said many other organizations like the Indian Students Association are centered around specific ethnicities and can feel “isolating” because participants are not able to share their “unique” experiences if they do not align with the organization’s focused culture. The group’s open table discussion about the challenges minority students face in the classroom, like expectations to be an expert on their own culture, allows minority students to learn from one another’s experiences, she said.
“While we may be different, we have shared experiences not being part of the majority in this country,” Gopinath said. “What we really want and what the founders wanted was to build a space for women, especially who are often hit with a double standard when you’re a person of color and you’re female.”
She said members organized a women’s history event in early March focused on historical and current women in STEM, government and art to connect different fields with students’ interests.
The organization hosted a professional panel in November to discuss challenges in the workforce and address students’ concerns about classroom obstacles, like discussions around “sensitive” topics for students as part of a “traditionally oppressed identity,” she said.
She said speakers of the panel included Scheherazade Rehman, an international finance and business professor; Madalene Xuan-Trang, the president of the Asian Pacific American Institute for Congressional Studies; and Jacqueline Reyes, an audit senior at Ernst and Young – a multinational professional service firm.
She said the group intends to expand its outreach to the GW Alumni Association in the fall to increase the organization’s professional events and guest speakers. The e-board members spoke with other student organizations like Women in Finance and Casa Blanca – a Latinx infinity in District House – this year to participate in and co-sponsor each other’s events throughout the academic year, like a movie night and discussion about the movie “Hidden Figures.”
“We wanted them to advertise what we were doing but we didn’t necessarily enlist their help because I feel like a lot of people – just based on how society is – a lot of professional people are predominantly Caucasian,” she said.
The group leaders created a website last summer to feature the organization’s upcoming events, and members sent out a bi-weekly newsletter to general body members about events throughout the year.
AnaSofía Stieglitz, a recent graduate and the organization’s former vice president, said roughly 15 students on average participated in the organization’s bi-weekly events throughout the academic year. The Women in History event emphasized women across different fields of study so a “broader” community of students attended the event, she said.
Stieglitz said the organization collaborated with Kavita Daiya, the director of the Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies program and an associate professor of English, to discuss holding open table events – designed for students to talk about personal experiences as a woman of color – for next semester. She said the organization is working with Daiya to create a “staple” event with professional networking opportunities and food from multiple cultures.
“I think that was just indicative of the partnerships and just what we want with WOC in the future,” she said. “It could be something low key, but at the same time, it can be really impactful both during college and beyond. So that’s something we hope to do with our staple event.”
Rising senior Caitlyn Phung, a co-founder and former president of WOC and former Hatchet reporter, said the organization focused this year on establishing their presence on campus as a space for minority women to share their stories and “empower” one another based on their varying identities. The group also facilitated a presentation about suffrage for women of color in November at the Diversity Summit.
She said the organization took multiple trips to the National Portrait Gallery to see artwork about black community empowerment in the fall to open up discussions about different perspectives of women of color through visual components. The organization also added a community service chair to their newly elected e-board to expand the group’s service in the D.C.-area, she said.
“That was a great way to get people to come out of the GW area to really explore women of color in the general D.C.- area and that’s also something we’d like to do in the future,” she said.
