Name: Iryna Slavinska
Age: 29
Education: French philology, Kyiv National Linguistic University
Profession: journalist, translator, literature critic
Did you know? Slavinska translated the book “This is Not the End of the Book” by Umberto Eco and Jean-Claude Carrière into Ukrainian.
For 10 years, Iryna Slavinska has been one of Ukraine’s top journalists writing about culture and, in particular, literature. About six years ago, she also started covering gender issues, calling for gender equality in the media and in life.
She has worked with online news website Ukrainska Pravda, the cultural magazine Sho (What), and women’s magazine Elle Ukraine. In 2012, Slavinska worked for the TVi television channel, but she, along with about 30 colleagues, left after a scandal over the change in the channel’s ownership.
Together with other prominent journalists, she worked on the revival of non-commercial and non-governmental Hromadske Radio in 2013.
Slavinska took on one more project in the summer of 2015, when she started to work for Povaha (Respect), a campaign that promotes equal rights for men and women.
Slavinska calls herself “sensitive to everything that concerns human rights protection.”
Gender equality “has been always obvious to me, as well as to every woman or girl who went through school or university in Ukraine, but I haven’t been thinking about it that much,” she said. “There are some things that you need to see, you kind of know them but don’t pay attention to them.”
During her first year at the university, Slavinska was reading Ukrainian female literary scholars, who used instruments of feministic criticism. The issue clicked for her.
Slavinska also remembers how once a man refused to shake her hand simply because she is a woman.
“It was very funny, it wasn’t any kind of trauma, it was a simple situation, but I felt a collapse in my head,” Slavinska said. “It was just another one of those moments when I thought that something was not right.”
Slavinska focuses in particular on sexism in the Ukrainian media, monitoring their coverage and giving lectures to journalists.
“You don’t have to be some special media or some special journalist not to use hate speech, not to use all these idiotic stereotypes. If you write in normal language about all people – this is a part of journalistic standards.”
