Partnering with the Women's Forum to empower women to speak from a #PositionOfStrength

By
Thursday, 8 December 2016

Twitter partnered with the Women’s Forum for their Global Meeting in Deauville. The Forum is the world’s leading global platform for women to elevate their voices on issues of major social, political, environmental and economic concern. As part of our participation in the three-day event, we hosted our first #PositionOfStrength event in France. #PositionOfStrength is Twitter’s safety and women’s empowerment initiative.

Our goal in Deauville was to communicate the power of Twitter as a tool to amplify discourses of equality and respect. #PositionOfStrength is about encouraging women to harness the power of their voices within society; to speak up, to create networks of collective support, and to ensure they are heard on issues of local or national importance.

Open to attendees of the Women’s Forum, the 45-min #PositionOfStrength session by Twitter aimed to equip women with the tools and strategies to safely deal with negative interactions. During the soapbox segment, attendees were invited to share their engaging, unique stories with the world — unfiltered and on their own terms.

We also took the opportunity to make the women in attendance aware of all the tools the company has developed, including the new expanded mute feature that enables people to silence keywords, phrases and even entire conversations from their notifications. Our goal with these latest safety changes is to place robust features in the hands of each and every Twitter account holder so that they can control their own individual experience.

Twitter has an unrivalled power to promote positive and alternative narratives to defend women’s voices around the world. With tips and inspiring examples, the #PositionOfStrength event provided attendees with best practice solutions to tackle sexism, discrimination and bias against women, not only on the internet, but in the wider social and professional spaces where it is still all too common a practice.

With #PositionOfStrength at the Women’s Forum, we harnessed the dynamism and energy of Twitter to empower women to connect, to speak out and to challenge prejudice in order to push the needle of equality forward.