online – Cutting through the Chatter: Gender Matters in the Atomic Age

Speaker:  Mary Olson, Founder and Director, Gender and Radiation Impact Project (GRIP)

Education in the USA doesn’t include much on international bodies like the UN, agreements like Treaties, or other international laws, and so we are generally unaware of enormous progress being made on nuclear weapons at the global level. Olson will introduce, and frame her talk by sharing a few of the moving parts of both the United Nations where she has been a participant since 1998 and also the new Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW).

Olson’s work centers on an independent, and confirming finding she made in 2011 that ionizing radiation from the US nuclear attack on Japan in 1945 impacted the female A-bomb survivors from Hiroshima and Nagasaki more than the males. This finding remains under-reported, and yet, is a keystone for bringing nuclear weapons into the domain of Humanitarian law at the UN, and the new TPNW itself. Olson acknowledges that biological sex (where the finding on radiation resides) and gender (much more complex) are not the same, and welcomes discussion of both.

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