Our second speaker is Associate Professor and Coordinator of Women's and Gender Studies at MREU. She teaches courses in feminist and queer theories, critical masculinity studies, and global gender issues. Please welcome Kimberly A. Williams to the stage! Woo! Woo! Woo! Woo! Woo! Alright. So, every year, the Canadian Center for Policy Alternatives conducts a survey of Canada's largest cities, just to see how women are fairing in those cities. Calgary is consistently in the bottom five. Of the largest 25 metropolitan areas in Canada, Calgary ranks a Paltry 22. This ranking is based on research done in four areas. Educational attainment, economic security, personal security, and health status. So, let's talk about educational attainment. Questions here include, are women finishing high school? Are they going on and to graduate from university? Are they moving on to graduate school? Calgary is actually doing pretty well here. Women in Calgary are more likely than men to have completed high school, college, or university. Calgary is among the most educated of 25 major cities, and 28% of women here actually hold university degrees. The problem is that Calgary also ranks among the worst cities in Canada for gender pay equity and employment opportunities. So, economic security refers to whether or not women have access to stable, sustainable employment, that enables them to support themselves and their dependent children. And in Alberta, they often do not. So, the result is that women who are graduating from university in our province are leaving in record numbers. Across Canada, women are still consistently under employed. Women are less than men, even when they have the same education, experience, and work in the same field. And this is magnified in Alberta because our economy is rooted in male dominated areas of oil and gas, ranching, mining, and logging. At 66 cents on the dollar, Alberta has by far the highest gender wage gap in Canada. In other words, here in Alberta from October to December, women work for free. In Canada, as well as across Alberta, women comprise the overwhelming majority of poor people. This puts them at incredible risk of sexualized violence. So, now we talk about personal security. What are rates of men's violence against women here in Calgary? What types of gender based and sexualized violence are affecting women in our city? Women in Canada are 11 times more likely than men to be sexually assaulted. This number increases exponentially for Indigenous women, racialized immigrant women, disabled women, and older women, and as a direct result of systemic racism and sexism stemming from 500 years of colonial policies, Indigenous women are killed at six times the rate of non-Indigenous women, usually by white settler men. Nearly 4,000 Indigenous women and girls have gone missing or have been murdered since the 1970s. And rates of men's violence against women in Alberta have skyrocketed in recent years. Roughly 74% of Albertans know a woman who has experienced physical or sexual abuse. This is compared to just 67% of Canadians nationally. Calgary currently has the third highest rates of domestic violence among major Canadian cities, but estimates indicate that 70% of that violence is actually unreported. So, this rate is likely much, much higher. One of the consequences of all of this is that women in Calgary are at very high risk of poor health outcomes. So now we talk about health status. Let's talk about sex ed. One third of Canadians understand what consent means and why it matters. That's not a good number. But thanks to the NDP, sexual education in Alberta now includes teaching the concept of consent. Their explicit goal has actually been to mitigate the high rates of violence against women in our province. But women are also still facing in Alberta bullying and harassment when they're trying to access their right to safe abortions. The NDPs recently passed or attempted to rectify this problem by passing legislation that creates safe zones around reproductive health care clinics. And lastly, although it's not a criteria that the Canadian Center for Policy Alternatives includes in their annual survey, I actually want to tell you that Calgary is near the bottom of the pack when it comes to women in leadership and decision making positions. Women make up just 30% of elected officials in our city. Women do fare slightly better outside of politics here in our province, but part of the problem is that Alberta's oil and gas industry is overwhelmingly male dominated and still lacks women in crucial leadership roles. So let's talk about some solutions. The first, obvious one, is simply increased numbers of women in leadership positions in all levels in all sectors. Men still hold the overwhelming majority of leadership roles that shape policy and procedures in key institutions, including law enforcement, government, education, and the justice system. The second, elect leaders at municipal, provincial, and federal levels who understand and care about these problems and who have clear, coherent, workable plans for solving them. Advocate, third, for a provincial, universal basic income and a progressive tax structure, these will go a long way to eradicating women's poverty in our province. Research highlights this is number four, that men are more receptive to hearing social marketing messaging from other men. So, men and white people! Take a social justice workshop, take a bystander intervention workshop, take an anti-racist workshop, take all three. If you didn't know about any of this stuff that I'm talking about, you have privilege and you have privilege not to know about it because you don't have to worry about it. If you don't know how to recognize those privileges, then learn how to work with marginalized groups to solve them. Don't swoop in, don't come in and think you know all the things, ask them what they need and then go do it. Support your local and national women's organizations, they are uniquely positioned to understand the needs of those they serve. They are also among the smallest and underfunded of all the nonprofit organizations in Canada. But they are this single most effective means to solving the problems, building better public policy and better lives for women and their families. Everything I've said tonight is only about men and women. So the sixth thing we need to do is do better in collecting data about transgender and non-binary folks, because gender justice is long overdue. You