Today was the day we had all been anticipating, it was presentation day. Before we left for this trip to the UK we had a pre-departure presentation we had to do. We chose our groups and chose an area we wanted to research while we were in Birmingham. My group chose to focus on the experience and treatment of immigrants in education and healthcare in the US and UK. However for the rest of this blog I am going to focus on what the other groups presented and did research on.

Group one focused and did research on mental health in the UK and US.  This group really explained well the process of referrals and different types of referrals that GP’s can give in regards to mental health in the NHS. Additionally they had a lot of information about the funding of the NHS which I knew somewhat before. They focus on the intersectionality between age and gender in mental health which was really interesting and shocking. They found from some reserach that men commit suicide at much much higher rates than women and it was the highest in the age range of 45-49. This is in both the UK and US. They suggested that one reason men do not seek mental health support or get support is because of gender stereotypes, like that men are tougher or that they shouldn’t show their emotions and feelings and if they do they are weak. They also touched upon other mental health disparities such as access, in the US they mentioned that access to mental health is limited in rural areas and much more abundant in urban areas and this matched the UK. They also made an interesting point that covid has led to mental health being slightly less stigmatized not necessarily because the world wanted to but because the world needed to.

The next group that went focused on why racial distrust exists in healthcare and education in the US and UK. The first most interesting thing in my opinion was when they mentioned that many physicians had been found to be determining kidney function based on race and not actual clinical information. I found this very shocking and frustrating because physicians are individuals who people go to help for and need to be able to put trust in and not fear judgment. A Lot of their presentation and research focused on what has led to this mistrust amongst ethnic minorities and the health and education system. They put a large emphasis on past legacies of these systems and the people who ran these systems. For example they mentioned how in teh US slaves were not exclusively used for labor but for medical experiments and muyilation wuthout consent. The reason they were used was based on the idea that they were thought to not feel pain as much or have much higher tolerance. Another example is like the Tuskegee experiments, and many other racial disparities. IN an education sense some of these disparities are the school to prison pipeline, and how schools with a more diverse ethnic population will receive less funding on average, furthermore in the US and UK children that are a part of ethnice minorities perform worse than their white counterparts. I found it realt powerful when one of the group members said her first non-white mentor and/or teacher is Vina who is one of oure lectuers at BCU. This made me realize how fortunate I have been to have a diverse range of teachers and mentors throughout my education.

The last group to go had done research and presented on sexism in healthcare and education. I really appreciated that they chose to add a disclaimer of sorts saying how gender is a social construct but for the sake of the presentation they were going to define gender as male and female. A large part of their presentation was focused on pink-collar jobs. Prior to their presentation I did not know what a pink-collar job is, or I should say I didn’t know that that was the name of jobs that are seen as “female jobs”. They gave some really intriguing statistics about the percent of female workers in education, nursing and social work in the US. All three of these jobs are considered to be pink collar jobs. The percent for education was 74%, nursing was 88% and social work was 84%. They mentioned multiple times throughout their presentation that if young kids do not see themselves in certain positions they will assume they are not meant for them. Therefore since the three jobs have a history of being female dominated there are little men in these fields. This is a huge issue because these jobs are jobs that people trust in and need to feel represented in.

I learned a lot about each of these topics I mentioned today as well as a lot about my own topic, but that blog might be for a different time. I really enjoyed seeing all the hard work people put in and the hard work my group put in. It feels relieving to have presented our findings  and I feel really accomplished having done so. As a group we were all joking about how we should all get PhD’s after presenting, however we are really far from that. Although I am sad to be leaving BCU, I am ready to start again in August at Pitt.