Goal 5: Learning and students
The University’s learning and student activities play a key role in our approach to the Sustainable Development Goals.
Here’s a wider showcase of our work addressing Goal 5.
The University’s School of Social Sciences hosts a four-day Summer School on Women in Logic every year. The programme is aimed at 16- to 18-year-old women and girls from widening participation backgrounds, with the goal of addressing the underrepresentation of women in logic and philosophy, while also encouraging more widening participation students to pursue philosophy as a field of study.
Co-founded by the University’s Faculty of Biology, Medicine and Health PhD student Beth Barnes, the Alternative Football League (AF League) is the North West’s only fully inclusive football league for women, non-binary and transgender individuals. AF League have three leagues across Manchester and Liverpool with 30 teams and over 400 players. They aim to use football as a platform to improve the mental health of women and non-binary people throughout the UK with their very own mental health and inclusivity workshops.
Each year we celebrate International Women’s Day with various events and activities for students and staff to partake in to increase awareness about discrimination, recognise women’s achievements and take action to drive gender equity.
We work in collaboration with Association des Guides du Rwanda (AGR) to provide volunteer opportunities for students to help girls and young women in Rwanda acquire skills for their development and become agents of positive change.
Our students started a Misogyny Is Hate campaign, leading to the government directing police to record crimes motivated by a person’s sex or gender for the first time.
Our Students’ Union also runs Reclaim the Night, resulting in around 2,000 women marching in the streets each year to raise awareness of sexual harassment and gender-based violence.
Gender equality is embedded across our whole curriculum, and a wide range of our degrees offer course units on gender and sexuality.
For examples, Religion and Theology students assess the impact of changing gender roles on religious traditions, while our MA in Gender, Sexuality and Culture brings together scholars from many different fields to explore feminist and queer theory, sexual identities and gender history.