Women's group name change strives for inclusiveness

This year, Penn Consortium of Undergraduate Women got a facelift, rebranding as the Penn Association for Gender Equity.

PAGE is an umbrella group that focuses on community, advocacy and serving its constituent groups including the Panhellenic Council, UPenn Women’s Political League and Wharton Women. In many cases, member organizations were more well-known than PCUW itself, but with its new name, PAGE hopes to be more active.

PAGE “wanted to have something that was more focused on the activism of the group,” PAGE Communications Chair and College sophomore Meghana Nallajerla said. Students outside of PAGE’s member groups expressed little knowledge of its programming. Nallajerla said she hopes the name change will make the organization’s activities more prominent.

Another major reason for the name change was to reinforce PAGE’s inclusiveness.

PAGE, according to its mission statement, promotes “gender and social justice and serves as an umbrella group for a diverse range of constituent organizations at Penn.” Whereas PCUW “did not accurately represent where we wanted our organization to be or the direction we wanted it to head in,” Nallajerla said.

According to their website, PAGE hopes to “tackle the issues that are facing women on our campus and beyond and do so in a way that embraces and celebrates diversity: LGBTQ and transgender women, women of color, socioeconomically disadvantaged women.”

The name change reflects changing attitudes toward gender identities.

“The former name had women in it, and we are trying to be more open to genderqueer people, non-binary people and men,” Nallajerla said. “As long as you’re interested in gender equity, it doesn’t matter what gender you identify with: You are welcome.”

The old name, with the word “women” right in the title, might have been unintentionally exclusionary to other gender identities, and the new name reflects PAGE’s commitment to including all students and student groups that support women and gender equity.

Constituents have generally responded positively to the new name.

“Members of PAGE-affiliated student groups are all advocates in one form or another, and so I applaud this reignited effort. It gives us yet another reason to come together and work toward the goals we are so passionate about,” Co-Director of Penn Women’s Political League and College senior Jordan Dannenberg said.

And to many, PAGE is way less of a mouthful than PCUW.

“I do think its definitely easier for people to remember,” Nallajerla said.

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