Celebrating Diversity and Girl Power

The New Brunswick Immigrant Women’s Association celebrated their first birthday by bringing together women from around Fredericton to learn about some of the challenges immigrant women face.

Over 50 people piled into a St. Thomas University lecture hall to listen to three immigrant academics present their research on problems the immigrant community faces.

Co-founder of the organization Natasha Akhtar said this is a great way to bring women of different backgrounds together.

“Dealing with the local community we feel that they may not be aware of the very multi-layer challenges we face. Both as an immigrant, as a woman and in particular a racialized woman. Where it is step by step, we just keep adding to the challenges,” said Akhtar.

The New Brunswick Immigrant Women’s Association has a goal to build a community of all backgrounds so that immigrant women realize that while they’re issues are unique to them that they are not alone.

The association invites all women to be official members of their organization. Only immigrant women can be board members and men cannot join but are invited to be unofficial allies of the association.

Akhtar says it is important to hold conferences like this and too allow all women to participate to build a stronger community.

“When you communicate your experiences and say, ‘I found this difficult,’ ‘I found that difficult,’ we felt that there was a similarity between experiences that we faced as women that were new to Canada,” she said.  “And even if your family has been here for generations you may be seen as others because they did not look like everyone else. There was a similarity that was seen there and that is how we came to have this particular conference.”

The speakers at the conference were three female academics from St. Thomas and the University of New Brunswick.

Gul Caliskan, an associate professor in the sociology department at STU, spoke about problems with white feminism. She started her presentation with a sarcastic video about Caucasian women taking white feminism pills to help them ignore issues outside of their comfort zone.

She noted that white women pretend to be colourblind to show their support and participate in fake acts of kindness to make themselves feel better.

“Step aside and give us the mic,” said Caliskan.

UNB professor Funke Aladejebi took over for Caliskan and talked about some of the challenges immigrant women face in the Canadian work-force.

Aladejebi shared testimonials from her research subjects who explained some of the discrimination they feel in their everyday work. She said that immigrant women feel the need to continuously earn more qualifications to be equal in the Canadian workforce.

STU professor, Fariba Solati shared her research that was focused on Middle Eastern and North African women in the workforce.

She discovered that when coming to Canada women from these regions participate in the workforce at higher numbers than women of other regions.

She says this is because when in their home countries these women are meant to take on leisure labour, which includes home duties, childcare and planning social events.

After the presentations a hour-long question period took place where attendees spoke of their own experience with discrimination and inter-sectional feminism.

Akhtar said the response to the conference will lead to many similar discussions.

“We want people to know they can say what the like and communicate their challenges and not feel that they’re going to be judged or laughed at or considered odd because their challenges are different than what most people are used to.”

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