By Katrina Shankle

During one of my English club debates we contemplated if women were equal. The responses highlight how unequal our world remains. The girls in the club who did stand up and say they had the same right to opportunity- that they could be a president or a business owner, were mocked. Even worse they were heckled if they suggested they had the right to not be beaten. One boy in the class commented, “sometimes women act like monkeys, you must hit them so they behave”, when I asked what he meant by act like monkeys he said, for example if he came home and there was no food on the table. I was also informed that biologically, women were built to be less intelligent and less strong than men. I tried to challenge this line of thought, comparing the stereotypes that women face today to the stereotypes faced by the black community in America before and after the Civil Rights Movement. I explained that the things they were saying about women were similar to what white people said about black people in America, but it didn’t resonate with my audience.

Living as an American woman, in a place where gender inequality is generally more subtle, it is easy to forget that I belong to the single most disenfranchised group in the world. “..up to 70 per cent of women experience physical or sexual violence from men in their lifetime-the majority by husbands, intimate partners or someone they know…Among women between 15 and 44, acts of violence cause more death and disability than cancer, malaria, traffic accidents and war combined[i] . Femicide, the murder of women because they are women happens around the world- in the US one third of women killed each year are killed by a partner and in South Africa a woman is killed every 6 hours by a partner[ii]. About 6.2% of potential female births are aborted in India because an ultrasound revealed the sex. That’s 480,000 per year, which is more than the number of girls born in the UK each year.[iii] In 2007, India reported 8,093 cases of dowry-related deaths, a number that does not include falsely labeled suicides and accidents.[iv] “Women and girls comprise 80 percent of the estimated 800,000 people trafficked annually, with a majority (79 percent) trafficked for sexual exploitation…Approximately 100 to 140 million girls and women in the world have experienced female genital mutilation/cutting, with more than 3 million girls in Africa annually at risk of the practice…Over 60 million girls worldwide are child brides, married before the age of 18, primarily in South Asia (31.1 million) and Sub-Saharan Africa (14.1 millon).[v]

Standing in that class listening to teachers and students alike, people who I consider my friends in the community, casually talk about my biological inferiority, watching them with their arrogant laughter, put those girls bold enough to stand up and say their piece in their so-called place shook me with rage and sadness. How could it be that this happens? How could it be that I live in a world where if I wasn’t lucky enough to be born into a strong family in America that I could be married off, that my role would be to reproduce, to accept that my fidelity would be necessary but my husband would be silently allowed to take on more wives. That my genitals would somehow be offensive to the world and something needed to be mutilated to remain pure. That if I strayed from my obligatory housewife role that my husband would have the right to beat me. It is a global ugly truth that somehow we have come to accept through complicity.

Taking a step back from my last Camp GLOW where we had sessions that taught girls about the futures they should fight for, the rights they have and how to avoid sexual advances from teachers, I had ask myself what kind of world are we living in, that this is what we have to teach these girls? And worse I had to ask myself, if by teaching these girls how to be strong, we were teaching them how to “misbehave”. I have to believe upon returning home, most shied back into the role they are allowed, and of those that did heed our advice, I wonder if they are paying the price for being a free thinker. Teaching these girls what their rights ought to be isn’t enough, it doesn’t change the rest of the community, it doesn’t pave the road to the future. I hope it does encourage some to fight for what is theirs, I hope some know they deserve better.

When I began researching this piece originally about women in politics, I thought I would write more specifically about the glass ceiling women face in politics; I wanted to talk about case studies like Hillary Clinton and Margaret Thatcher, both strong women who as politicians were brutalized for their bull-like behavior that would have been glorified if they had been born with a Y chromosome. Yet, that feels almost frivolous now. I don’t think Hillary cares that she is called cold, I think she cares to see the agenda she believes in pushed and I think she would be ok with taking the brunt of our gender biases if it meant the next woman in her shoes got a fair shot. I think it matters that there is still a glass ceiling in places like America, because until we can get it right there, how can we ask others to do what we fail at? I think it matters around the world that women hold positions of power in politics, because who best to advocate for the universal rights of women than women, who best to stand as role models than women who have broken the glass ceiling and who best to participate in an international dialogue about what it means to be equal than the disenfranchised?

Women in America have made significant headway: we have written the 19^th amendment and the Equal Rights Amendment, we (with limitations) have the right to abortions, have the right to divorce and alimony, we have paid maternity leave and nondiscrimination acts to protect our hiring as well as the equal pay act, we have sexual harassment and domestic violence laws, and shelters for women who have no place to turn. Yet even still the rate of sexual assault, domestic violence, sexual harassment in the workplace, wage inequality, disparities in the number of women who are CEOs of fortune 500 companies, representation in Congress, and participation and mistreatment in the military continue to suggest that there is more to be done for the women’s rights at home. How then can we be surprised to learn that in countries with far less protection of human rights on paper women are shackled to the discriminatory lifestyles that have become a kind of social norm?

During the Civil rights movement it took strong leadership by those who boldly stood in the face of danger to demand to be considered equal. The black community got angry, they said “no I will not accept this”. They resisted unfair laws, they faced jail time, beatings and murder they took to the streets, and they rioted, they made America and the world look at its own ugliness. Where is that fire for women’s rights? Why haven’t we advocated more for the lives of women who weren’t so lucky to be able to stand up for themselves? Why haven’t we demanded better, and not accepted our failures to fundamentally protect human rights a greater failure than just a missed piece on a political agenda? It’s not enough to characterize acts as good and bad, and it’s not enough to say that gender discrimination is a problem. There needs to be more done, more commitments made and risks taken to protect the lives of women around the world. There needs to be more done to educate the populous on the rights of women, on the need for equality and cultural sensitivity cannot be at the expense of a woman’s life. As more than 50% of the world’s population, it is time that women got an equal number of seats at every table.