When Women Win, We all Win
When the whole world is silent, even one voice becomes powerful. - Malala Yousafzai
Imagine that your team qualified to play at the FIFA World Cup. An incredible opportunity to take home a big honor. Imagine that you get on the field and you see the other team. Eleven players getting ready to play you and your team for the winning title. They are all fit, well trained, and ready. As you step onto the field with your teammates the referee tells you that you cannot play with all eleven. You can only play with five people. You have to cut your team in half. Eleven on the other team vs five on your team. Who is more likely to win?
That is how the world works. We are all interconnected, and helping just half of our population will have disastrous outcomes for all of us.
“Inequality for women not only affects women, but men as well. When men are unable to express their feelings or expected to act tough in order to ‘be manly’, it hurts us all.”
For generations, women have been treated as inferiors. From not being able to vote less than a century ago in the United States, to having little to no say over what happens to their own bodies when it comes to healthcare or in the clothes they wear (different countries have introduced different laws, legislation, or proposals to limit the clothing women wear including countries like Saudi Arabia and France -- and more recently Morocco and Germany.) Control over women doesn't stop there. There are even life-threatening practices, like female genital mutilation, that can cause long-term health problems for women and girls.
In some places, it is more desirable to give birth to a boy than a girl, leading to sex-selective abortions and infanticides.
And, in other places, an even more impactful truth becomes the reality of tomorrow: education, one of the greatest gifts you can give a human being, is kept from many girls around the world.
Inequality for women not only affects women, but to a very large extent, it deeply affects men. When men are unable to express their feelings or expected to act tough in order to 'be manly', it hurts us all. When men are not expected to be responsible in taking care of their children or expected to be the breadwinners, we take away a lot of joy and freedom from their lives.
Equality is not something that only helps women, it helps all of us.
“Culture does not make people. People make culture. If it is true that the full humanity of women is not our culture, then we can and must make it our culture.”
