Why we need to take these urgent steps now towards a new gender equality

Emma Watson’s recent speech at the launch of the UN Women’s HeForShe campaign, on reclaiming the semantics of feminism and inviting men to the discussion in order to advance feminism has rightly attracted much interest and praise.

Watson is right that feminism has become synonymous with diminishing men, that it has become a word that many women and men shy away from. I agree with feminism as she has defined it: in terms of equality with men. To distinguish this from what it’s become, I will call it ‘equality feminism’.

She is also right that in a world where women are not just paid less and discriminated against but also killed, raped, trafficked, abused and sold purely because of their gender that something drastic needs to be done to ensure lasting change across the world. Watson says that men need to be invited to the table to work with women to advance real change.

The situations facing women around the world makes this discussion urgent. Girls in Nigeria are kidnapped. Women in India are being gang raped. Trolls tweet that they are going to rape prominent women for holding opinions. Girls are being denied education. Girls are being genitally mutilated. Women are being abused and raped by their husbands. Girls are being targeted by sex gangs. Women are victims of rape as a weapon of war.

My dad and I have always thought of ourselves as equality feminists. Our solution is for all men of all ages (particularly when they’re young) to reflect upon the fact that their mother is a woman, their sister is a woman, their grandmother is a woman, their auntie is a woman, their wife is a woman and that their daughters are women. Do any men believe that the women listed above should be mistreated in any way? Or mistreated purely because they are women? Of course not. When a man thinks of his daughters, how does he feel knowing that they might be paid significantly less because she is a woman? Or assaulted because she is a woman? Or belittled and patronised purely because she is a woman? Or not given the same opportunities as men because she is a woman?

It follows that any women not in a man’s list above is someone else’s mother, wife, daughter, aunt, and grandmother. Every woman in the world is in some man’s list somewhere.

Let’s build a world where women are valued and treated as the equals of men that they are. If every man reflected on his own list and also considered the type of world that their daughters are entering into and imagining the kind of world that they would want for their daughters, we would go a long way towards achieving true gender equality now.

First published on www.edmondchan.co.uk