A new wind for equality: Lisa Pingel fights for women's rights!

A new wind for equality: Lisa Pingel fights for women's rights!

The FernUniversität in Hagen has taken a significant step towards equality and diversity with the appointment of Lisa Pingel as the new equal opportunities officer on August 1, 2023. Pingel, a 27-year-old lawyer from Dortmund, was elected as the central equal opportunities officer by the women's advisory board on July 24, 2023. Her career at the FernUniversität began in 2021 when she worked as a research assistant. She then worked in the area of ​​gender in law and took over the position of advisor to the previous equal opportunities officer in 2022.

Pingel sees this new role as an important career step and would like to combine her extensive legal knowledge with her commitment to equality. One of its main concerns is promoting the rights of women and people of different genders. She is also committed to intersectional feminism, as she emphasizes. She criticizes legal training, which in her opinion often lacks critical reflection and realistic case studies.

Commitment to equality

As equal opportunities officer, Pingel plans to continue the work of her predecessors. In the last two years she has been involved in various equality projects, including the Orange Days, which are aimed internationally at combating violence against women and girls. Since 2023, she has also been the project manager for the topic of “Active Recruiting” as part of the federal and state professorship program. The aim of this project is to promote gender equality at universities and to support career and personnel development for female scientists.

A central component of the project is a guideline that was developed to improve the recruitment of female professors. This project will run until March 2026, working towards gender-equitable personnel practices. Another important concern for Pingel is the policy against sexualized violence and discrimination, which has also been in force at the FernUniversität since 2023. Here she helped design the complaint process and the advice center in order to offer support to those affected.

Intersectionality as a key concept

In her work, Pingel emphasizes the need for educational work and awareness-raising on issues such as sexual violence and abuse of power. A key aspect of its agenda is the promotion of the intersectional approach, which focuses on social identity categories such as class, ethnicity, gender, disability, sexuality, religion and nation. Intersectionality describes complex identities and analyzes how the different dimensions of a person's identity can lead to unique experiences of discrimination. The term, introduced by Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989, criticizes the reduction of discrimination to individual categories and calls for understanding and combating the interconnections between different forms of discrimination.

The application of intersectional thinking is now not only part of the feminist movement, but has also found its way into gender and diversity research as well as university teaching. Pingel's commitment to equality at the FernUniversität reflects this development by taking a comprehensive perspective on the challenges facing women and people of different genders.

With her appointment, Lisa Pingel has not only taken an important step for her own career, but also for the equality work at the FernUniversität, which focuses on promoting justice and equal opportunities. Her vision includes both structural changes and individual support to give those affected a voice and create a space for change. The journey to equality is long and challenging, but with Pingel at the helm, the FernUniversität will move forward on a promising path.