It can be hard being a girl.
For women in general on a global scale, the social struggle can be life-threatening and desperate. In figures I’ve gathered from the Global Poverty Project – an organization that aims for an end to extreme poverty by 2030 – women make up half the world’s population and yet represent an incredible 70% of the world’s poorest citizens. The reality is that, for a majority of the world’s females, life is a continuing struggle of gross injustice, suppression and inequality from birth to death. The statistics available on global issues such as education, employment prospects, quality of healthcare, nutrition and social vulnerability, women fall far below their male counterparts in the quality of each category they receive. The vicious cycle of discrimination that a woman often endures during her life is all too common.
The initiative Millennium Development Goal 3 exists to better promote gender equality and give hope to women worldwide. It’s an imperative project in tackling poverty and improving prospects for women in countries where it most needed, but it does little to tackle the first hurdle: the question of how it’s possible for women to break gender inequality, discrimination and domestic and social violence when they are caged in societies with socio-cultural traditions and laws which exclude them from having equal opportunities in all aspects of life as standard. In such cultures, women are often both literally and metaphorically invisible, preventing them from accessing even their most basic human rights.
In further figures that directly affect women here at home, too, we learn that women make up 70% of the world’s working hours but earn only 10% of the world’s income – an incredible half that of their male counterparts. This only perpetuates greater global poverty, slower economic growth and a lower living standard not just for women, but for families and the world’s population in general. In many developing countries with little infrastructure, millions of females die each year as a result of violence based entirely upon their gender. This old and hard-ironed discrimination creates a bleak outlook for women in such places, with it often being those closest to them who are the ones actually acting against the girl’s wellbeing; they are unwillingly at the receiving end of painful and needless cultural behaviours, their own parents may arrange them marriages because they know no better themselves, ultra-patriarchal societies tell them that they can be neither seen nor heard and must always limit their lives to their homes, and laws say they cannot attend school after a certain age. It is desperately sad for many reasons, but perhaps mostly because the world can never thrive to its full potential if half of half its population is treated in such a way.
But what – if anything – is the solution? Many social commentators such as The World Bank assert that “putting resources into poor women’s hands while promoting gender equality in the household and in society results in large development payoffs.” It is therefore fundamental to try and educate the most extreme communities, to subtly nurture their populations to allow their females the liberty of self-confidence and show them that their girls are not a threat and can only help them to prosper. Furthermore, girls and young women must be empowered to make choices about their and their communities’ own lives.
Here at the Glasgow Women’s Library, we encourage you to use both our extensive resources and your own initiative to research and inform yourself on issues that affect us as a global population. You are invited to delve into our archives to learn about and/or better understand a wide range of women’s history and issues, including those of women at home and abroad!
For this topic, we recommend:
Dignity and daily bread : new forms of economic organising among poor women in the Third World and the First by Sheila Rowbotham and Swasti Mitter
The caged virgin : a Muslim woman’s cry for reason by Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Gender and global justice by Alison M. Jaggar
Shattered : modern motherhood and the illusion of equality by Rebecca Asher
The equality illusion : the truth about women and men today by Kat Banyard
And
End of equality : the only way is women’s liberation by Beatrix Campbell
