Miracle Nwankwo

Most Rural women are known for household farming and trading to support the home while their husbands focus on lucrative crops, or migrate as seasonal or permanent workers. Asides being uneducated, local or rural women are reliable hands for viable roles when training and sensitization is in view.

This article is a call to governments, international organizations and NGOs on the need and benefits of introducing volunteering opportunities to local women especially in developing regions. The importance of this, is in its benefits and the impact it has on the women. If gender equality is a priority to all international organizations and government authorities, then this should be considered as one of the ways to achieving equality.  

Volunteering, has been a modern day system of doing something that aims to benefit the environment or someone who is not closely related to you without being paid. The benefits that accrues volunteering is enormous and can change a person’s life for the better.

Volunteering is providing support and help to individuals in need and vulnerable conditions. It goes a long in helping people(volunteers) connect, learn new skills, develop their career, and live a happier and healthier life. 

Speaking of health and happiness, volunteering is a way of philanthropy which also has vital benefits to the mind and body as such; protecting mental and physical health, reducing stress, combating depression, helping one to stay mentally stimulated, and providing a sense of purpose. Giving can improve one’s happiness, and volunteering is a simple means of giving that does not require a long-term commitment or take a huge amount of money from your bank account, yet it gives a sense of fulfilment and satisfaction.

In the light of this, getting local women involved in volunteering is a good idea to women’s development and gender equality. Therefore, here are three benefits of volunteering to the local woman.

Volunteering helps the local woman to connect and interact with her society: 

In terms of socializing, rural women are left behind, they live a stereotypic lifestyle which is not good for the mind. Rural women know little or nothing about what happens around the world so they can hardly promote the course of women. This is why in most politically corrupt nations they voluntarily sell their votes to wrong leaders who at the end rule against them. Volunteering is a way of exposure for the local-woman to get involved and interact with her society. It can help her connect with her community and make it a better place.

Volunteering involves shared activities and team work, which help the local-woman to meet people, make new friends and commit to the society. 

Volunteering boosts the local woman’s mental and physical health.

In Considering volunteering, the benefits it adds to both the mind and the body cannot be downplayed. If we all attest that health is wealth, then we should fight for the mental wellness of every local woman in the society.

Having to connect, interact and work with people has a profound effect on our psychological well-being, and this is an opportunity that volunteering provides. Volunteering thwart the effects of stress, anger, and anxiety. It combats depression and can keep one happy and fulfilled. It also boosts self-confidence. Thus, the need to get the local woman involved.

Volunteering a way to induce fun and fulfillment into a local woman’s life

With the high rate of depression and suicidal, thinking volunteering for the local woman is being proactive. Although cases of depression and suicide is not common among the rural settlers yet the spread is ravaging which means that the rural settlers are not safe. There are no cast on stone reasons to why people fall into depression and commit suicide but there are ways to combat them from being depressed. One of such ways is when then are involved in fulfilling and fun-filled activities like volunteering. 

Volunteering is a possible and convenient way of exploring and searching out one’s passion. For women in the rural areas who are not conversant with what their passions are, doing volunteer work can help find their areas of interest and passion. If they get involved in volunteer jobs, which is an escape from the day-to-day routine of farming or selling produce, taking care of home chores or family commitments, you will find that they will become motivated, energized and more proactive in those things that they have been accustomed to doing which is an advantage to them, their families and the society at large.

Therefore, if we love the local woman we must fight for their mental and physical wellness.

By Lahnee Pavlovich

I am a big believer in gender equality and passionate about equal rights, equal pay and equal recognition, not only when it comes to our female athletes, but for women in general.

I have a very young daughter and I hope that one day she will love sports as much as I do. She will certainly be encouraged to play, learn and get involved in a variety of sports as a kid. And if she chooses to take sport further one day, like most parents, I hope that she will have the same opportunities as her male counterparts.

Gender equality in sports has always been a controversial topic. Even the founder of the modern Olympics, Baron Pierre de Coubertin, said in 1896, “No matter how toughened a sportswoman may be, her organism is not cut out to sustain certain shocks.”

“Focus, determination, pain, disappointment, excitement, suspense, anger, relief: it’s all a part of the game whether you are a man or a woman,” Annie Spewak, former lacrosse player and junior at Robert Morris University studying Public Relations.

Although gender equality has come a long way, including UNESCO recognizing sports and physical activity as a human right in 1978, it still hasn’t come far enough.

Gender Equality – the stats!

In America 40% of sportspeople are women, however only 6-8% of the total sports media coverage is devoted to them. And women-only sports stories add up to just 3.5%of all sports stories in the four major US newspapers.

According to the Women’s Sports Foundation, male athletes get $179 million more in athletic scholarships each year than females do. Additionally, collegiate institutions spend just 24% of their athletic operating budgets on female sports, as well as just 16% of recruiting budgets and 33% of scholarship budgets on female athletes.

Some people have the argument that “women’s sport is not interesting enough”. And even though over the years the popularity of women’s sports is growing, unfortunately the media coverage and sponsorship dollars have not necessarily followed through and gender equality remains an issue.

Take last July’s Women’s World Cup soccer final for example. It was the most watched soccer match – men’s or women’s – EVER in the US with nearly 25.4 million viewers. Yet the players were far less compensated than their male counterparts.

“We are the best in the world, have three World Cup championships, four Olympic championships, and the men get paid more to just show up than we get paid to win major championships,” Hope Solo, American Goalkeeper.

The gender equality debate was reignited recently when former South African tennis professional Raymond Moore made a number of comments that were degrading to women in the sport. This was met with backlash from both female and male players including World Number 1 Serena Williams who was vocal in expressing her views on the subject.

What it boils down to is that we, collectively, men and women, need to do more about gender equality. We need to pave the way for or daughters, just as we do our sons. There should be no disparity in sports, nor in the workplace, nor in life. Women and men should be seen as, and treated as, equals in all respects. Gender should not be the thing that defines us or separates us from our fellow athletes. 

Let’s show our daughters that they can be whatever they want to be, and get paid well for it too!

TEDROS ADHANOM GHEBREYESUS , SENAIT FISSEHA

Women comprise 70% of health workers around the world. And yet a new report shows that 70% of health organizations are currently headed by men, and that the women working in these organizations earn 15% less, on average, than their male counterparts.

Since the start of the year, we have traveled from Afghanistan and Pakistan, where health workers administering the polio vaccine are battling snowstorms to reach children who need it, to North Kivu, where officials are trying to stop one of the deadliest Ebola outbreaks in history.

Women comprise 70% of these and other health workers around the world. And yet a new report from Global Health 50/50, released on the eve of this year’s International Women’s Day, shows that men hold a disproportionate share of power in the health sector and earn a disproportionate share of pay.

Having spent part of our careers assembling a force of female health workers who reduced deaths from AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis in Ethiopia by half, we know the contributions women make to public health. That is why, under Ghebreyesus’s tenure as director-general, the World Health Organization has a gender-balanced cabinet for the first time in its history. And with gender parity achieved in the institution’s senior positions at headquarters, we will be working to ensure that regional and country offices follow suit.

Gender parity is a practical as well as a moral issue. Having more women in leadership positions effects positive change throughout an organization, improving performance, innovation, creativity, resilience, and morale. It provides role models and informal support systems that have historically been lacking for women in the workplace. And it reduces tolerance for toxic workplace behavior such as sexual harassment.

But gender is also a key social determinant of health, which makes gender parity in the health sector a necessary ingredient for reaching the WHO’s “triple billion” targets. The organization’s goal is to ensure that by 2023, one billion more people than today have full access to health care, greater protection from health emergencies, and better overall health and wellbeing.

Among other things, we know that gender – that is, the socially constructed norms, roles, and expectations placed on men and women – has a profound impact on whether one is exposed to unhealthy products and places, or whether one engages in health-seeking and health-protecting behaviors. We also know that gender-based discrimination can have a significant impact on the delivery of health services.

And yet, while focusing on gender as a social determinant of health and establishing gender parity at the WHO’s leadership level were no-brainers, the Global Health 50/50 report shows that we are the exception to the rule. Having reviewed the policies and practices of nearly 200 health organizations, comprising a workforce of more than four million people across 28 countries, the report finds vast power and pay asymmetries between men and women.

For example, Global Health 50/50 finds that over 70% of health organizations are currently headed by men, and that in 40% of the organizations reviewed, women occupy fewer than one-third of senior management positions. And few will be shocked to learn that the women working in these organizations earn 13.5% less, on average, than their male counterparts.

Sadly, these findings are in keeping with what one finds in boardrooms across the corporate and non-profit sectors. But such disparities are all the more worrying when they show up in the global health sector, given its role in protecting the wellbeing and rights of all people everywhere.

From the WHO’s experience, we know that gender parity does not emerge organically. Achieving it requires deliberate and directed organizational change. Hence, the WHO’s new corporate strategy, which is geared toward the Sustainable Development Agenda’s mission of “leaving no one behind,” features a strong emphasis on measuring gender distributions, equity, and rights across all of the institutions’ programs. That means each department will be accountable for upholding gender parity.

But while putting gender parity at the center of the WHO’s operations is an important first step, the larger goal is to support our member states in serving the people whose lives, health, and wellbeing depend on collective public-health efforts. To that end, three priorities should guide our approach to global health at all levels, from the local clinic delivering essential care to national health ministries and multilateral institutions.

First, we need to ensure that gender analysis informs all health strategies and program missions. Without fully understanding the gendered factors that drive human health, we cannot possibly achieve universal and equitable outcomes.

Second, we urgently need to close the power and pay gap between men and women in the health sector, by pursuing deliberate strategies to level the playing field for women.

And, third, we must recommit to transparency and accountability in health organizations, including on gender equality. Only then can we root out toxic management cultures, improve quality of care, and foster openness and inclusion at all levels.

When people of different genders and backgrounds come together, they bring their own experiences and wisdom, and the result amounts to more than the sum of its parts. Diverse organizations arrive at better decisions, because they can consider problems from a wide range of perspectives and draw potential solutions from multiple contexts. When it comes to global health organizations, government ministries, and national health institutions, gender equality should be embraced not just for its own sake, but also because it works.

The Authors;

Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, a former Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, is the Director-General of the World Health Organization.

Senait Fisseha is Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology at the University of Michigan, Chief Adviser to the Director-General of the World Health Organization, and a member of the Global Health 50/50 advisory council.

This article was adapted from the Project Syndicate.

Maria is a successful businesswoman from Mexico who had always wanted to gain education and pursue a career in any of the science related fields, but never had the opportunity because her late father believed that a woman’s role is limited to the home.

However, Maria vowed to ensure that her daughters must live up to this dream.

But one day, she asked her 9-year-old daughter what she wanted to become when she grows up, and she quickly answered that she wants to be a writer or a teacher. She then asked her 7-year-old son the same question, and he proudly said that he wants to be a scientist or an engineer. These answers made a whole lot of sense considering that her daughter loves reading books and taking care of her American Girl doll while her son enjoys looking up science experiments and making Coke bottles explode with Mentos. But they never went down well with Maria.

You might want to pause and think, “what’s so wrong with this story?” After all, we need teachers and writers as much as we need scientists and engineers. Besides, what a kid wants to be when he or she is in elementary school isn’t necessarily indicative of their future career choices… right?

Fast-forward eight years. My junior year of high school, I took both IB Biology and IB Physics. The number of girls in my IB Biology class was about the same as the number of boys in the class. On the other hand, the number of girls in my IB Physics class was significantly smaller than the number of boys in the class. Similarly, in the Intel Science and Engineering Fair, the world’s top science and engineering competition for high school students, women made up 54 percent of the finalists in the biochemistry category but only 17 percent of the finalists in the computer science category.

Fast-forward eight more years. In 2010, women received on average about 14 percent of computer science undergraduate degrees at major research universities, and that number has not changed much since then. The trend that started in the elementary school that encourages girls to go into the humanities and boys to go into engineering and mathematics has prevailed throughout high school, college, and well into the workplace. The stereotypes we ingrain into our children at as early an age as four or five don’t just magically disappear when they get older. Instead, those stereotypes strengthen as children grow older and continue to explore the society that continually reinforces these stereotypes.

Why is it so important that we encourage more women to go into the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM)? Many of my friends, classmates, and even adult teachers and neighbors (both male and female) whom I have spoken to about this issue don’t seem to understand what the big deal is. So what if women hold less than 20% of computer science or engineering degrees? So what if fewer and fewer female students are enrolling in physics and technology classes as the years go by? We’ve come a long way since the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, they tell me. Maybe it’s time to give it a rest.

Here’s why it’s so important to encourage more women to go into STEM fields. In a country in which the average women still earn 77 cents for every dollar that a man earns, and in a country in which the majority of single parents are single mothers, getting more women into STEM could both reduce the gender wage gap and ensure that single mothers don’t have to struggle to put food on the table. Not only are there currently more jobs in the STEM field than in any other industry, but most of these high-tech jobs are high-paying, as well. According to the National Council for Women and Information Technology, there will be around 1.4 million computer specialist job openings expected in the U.S. by 2020. Women have the capability to hold 50 percent of those jobs. Yet, in order to get to the point where women earn fifty percent of STEM degrees and hold fifty percent of STEM jobs, we need to start at the very beginning.

By the very beginning, I mean pre-K, when kids are just beginning to learn basic math and science skills and most likely have not yet been exposed to the stereotypes regarding men and women in STEM. By the time women reach college or even high school, it may be too late to change their minds about going into STEM. After all, choosing a major or a career is a lifelong process of determining what we enjoy doing. And much of what we enjoy doing is determined early on by outside forces such as parents, teachers, and society’s general expectations.

Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s Chief Operating Officer, recently mentioned that of the 35 kids in a Stanford technology camp for young children, only five were girls. Of those five girls, Sandberg herself had enrolled two of them (her niece and her niece’s friend). What does this say about the parents of the girls who could have been in that camp? If a girl’s parents don’t believe in their daughter’s ability to succeed in engineering and technology, how can we expect that girl to grow up and believe in it herself? In order to get more women into STEM, we need to start by eliminating our subconscious attempts to gear our young boys towards STEM and keep our young girls in the dark.

Now, what about those of us who don’t have children yet? Can we do anything to help the gender gap in STEM? Yes, yes we can. According to Jocelyn Goldfein, the director of engineering at Facebook, the reason there aren’t more women computer scientists is “because there aren’t more women computer scientists.” If girls see that most of their female mentors and older female friends aren’t going into STEM, they are less likely to go into those fields themselves. Part of the reason behind this phenomenon is the stereotype threat, which states that if we are aware of a stereotype, we are more likely to act in accordance with it. In order to help our young girls to not be afraid of STEM fields such as engineering and computer science, older girls and young women need to show that we are not afraid of these fields ourselves.

Individually, we can’t change the fact girls make up a very small percentage of the programmers, engineers, and scientists shown on television and in movies, nor can we change the way the media portrays girl “geeks.” What we can do, however, is to make a difference in the lives of the young girls we know personally. And one day, the young girls we help will grow up to cure diseases, write computer programs, discover the next technological advances, and ultimately change the world.

Written by Celia Islam
Source: huffingtonpost.com
Title: Closing the STEM Gender Gap: Why Is It Important and What Can You Do to Help?

“I think you should focus on your role as a wife and mother.”

Those were the words Beatrice received from a bank manager while bidding for a loan to start up a business. She had walked home unhappy under the scorching sun, again – she had been turned down by the bank who refused to give her a loan to start up her business.

Each time Beatrice visits the bank, it turned out to be a bad day for her, they give her one hundred and one reasons why they think her business will never succeed. On this particular day she asked to see the bank manager who had conversed with her, and bluntly told her “we usually do not invest in women-owned businesses because we don’t think that they could sustain the pressure of growing a business, I think you should focus on your role as a wife and mother”.

She was stunned at his response and repeatedly asked herself how those self-made female business tycoons made it to the top?

“Did they actually pass through this process?” “Or is it just me?” Beatrice wondered.

Poor Beatrice; many female entrepreneurs around the world have shared similar experiences. They claim that they had no shortage of innovation or business ideas but the major barrier is undercapitalization and gender bias. Testimonies of many female entrepreneurs, about how they started their businesses, and the difficulties they faced, have reflected a similar pattern, they lack access to funding and support from the government, banks, and the incubator communities.

Women have claimed that being a woman entrepreneur comes with different hurdles than those of their male counterparts.

Shelley True of TrueDotDesign also gave her account of how she was turned down several times by money lenders and banks.  “I had to go to a number of lenders and banks and was turned down several times, for no real reason.” Even when she exceeded the revenue numbers the banks demanded approval, “they still turned me down” – she said.

Gender barrier is a normal challenge faced by women entrepreneurs while trying to start or grow their businesses, which has also resulted in the loss of confidence among many women in the business world. Each time this happens many women tend to give up on their business ideas, projects and dreams, just because they couldn’t find capital.

The journey to the top for many women in business are filled with potholes and when once that can be avoided, the woman entrepreneur would be able to achieve success.

Meanwhile, a particular school of thought is raising the notion against the amount of effort exerted on the push for gender equality, saying that the movement has gone too far. Hearing this for the first time, you might want to pause and take a closer look at the meaning of that assertion, but how convincing can that be? When there are still women all over the world complaining about the struggles they go through in the business world based on their gender.

People often argue that most Western societies have achieved gender equality and women have all the same legal rights as men, but on the other hand, feminists continue to argue that the battle for gender equality is not yet won.

The curiosity about this matter is why have the banks, investors and governments failed to believe in the women. Different people are of different opinions as to why these things happen, but one of the common opinions is Gender Discrimination.

Even while the government claimed to have created various programs that are aimed at helping women entrepreneurs, many women still find the government programs to be inherently biased.

Speaking about the Government bias programmes, Jennifer Schoenhofer, the CEO and president of Axis Teknologies, a wireless infrastructure engineering firm in Marietta, Ga said “the federal government’s program to award 5 percent of contracts to women-owned businesses annually is meagre compared with the roughly 15 percent that minority business owners can get, – That in itself is inequality to me,” she stressed.

Despite the programs, training, grants, and support that female entrepreneurs have at their disposals, this debate still heats like a thunderbolt whenever it is raised. This issue appeals to every woman in the business world irrespective of the country or region they are from.

It is a general problem, considering the various annual listings of world billionaires, there is a clear observation about that these listings are male dominated.

Should the women give up and let things happen the way they will?

If anyone is of that opinion, it is as good as a bad idea because women play a huge role in the current world’s economy, it is therefore unhealthy to understate the importance of female entrepreneurs in any economy of the world.

Women are highly ambitious and often start their career at a young age. They cover many spheres of life from the media to fashion, sales, banking and many more. Presently there is no sector that is void of a woman.

However, there are still women whose journey has been a tough one and have not been able to achieve their aim without headaches and bumps in the road. Within them is a groaning pain to grow their businesses and succeed in life.

The gap between men and women rights to many of life advantages is still wide including the business sphere. Women entrepreneur are still faced with trials and tribulations of fundraising and gender bias, which means that there should be more room for the continuity of the gender equality pursuit.

Miracle Nwankwo