The Significance and Importance of Women’s Empowerment
More and more we live in a world where women are working in prominent roles that have been overwhelmingly dominated by men. As we continue to shed the strict notions of gender roles and the idea of what women should and shouldn’t do the more we will continue to develop in a global context. More women in the workplace means more doctors, lawyers, researchers, and entrepreneurs to make the world a better place for all of us. This is why feminism and women’s empowerment writ large is such a vital part of progress in the 21st century.
While progress is much slower in some parts of the world the stats don’t lie. The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in a 2012 report titled Gender Equality in Education, Employment and Entrepreneurship: Final Report to the MCM 2012 shows that increased educational opportunities for women over the past 50 years account for about half of the economic growth in OECD countries. This means in strictly economic terms the more opportunities women have the more sustainable our economies become. As such there’s an undeniable positive correlation between women’s attainment rates in education and increased positive economic outcomes in OECD countries. Conversely, nations where women have much lower educational attainment shows a stark contrast in these economic outcomes.
Gender gaps in labor force participation have narrowed dramatically, but occupational opportunity and pay gaps still exist in rather stark terms. The largest part of this pay gap exists due to the fact that women are vastly underrepresented in many of the highest paying professions in the market place. The Economist showed as of 2010 that only 15–20-percent of executives were women, less than 10-percent of top earners were women, and only 5-percent of women were CEOs. Some of these barriers include gender societal norms, a patriarchal corporate culture, lack of adequate life/work balance for women, and lack of access to social networks to name a few. These trends are changing, but now more than ever we must continue to vie for positive outcomes at the local, national, and global level.
Political representation is just as if not more important as economic inclusion for women. As of 2018 stats from The Center for American Women and Politics shows that in the United States women account for 51.4-percent of the voting electorate; yet, they represent 19.6-percent of the Congress, 22.8-percent of statewide executive positions, 25.4-percent of representation in state legislatures, 19-percent of Mayors in the 100 largest cities, and 21.6-percent of Mayors in cities with a population of over 30,000. This, of course, does not include the numerous other important outlets such as the various Supreme Courts, senior policy positions, etc. Women make up a slim majority of the voting electorate yet they, in most cases, don’t even represent a quarter of the country on its most pressing issues.
Most of the time we look at the world in political and economic terms, but the other aspect of this is a human and civil rights one. A dear friend of mine once told me something that profoundly changed how I view many gender related issues. Societally, more often than not, we assign some kind of value or relation to women. For example when we say what if it was your daughter or sister that was raped. It is, indeed, someone’s mom, daughter, sister, etc, but most important of all it’s someone. A woman is her own person first before she’s a mom, daughter, sister, friend, etc. Before you rebuttal with “what about men,” yes of course the same is true for us, but we seldom if ever get assigned the same kind of relation dependency or possession to something before we are our own person. Hence the old saying of “I’m my own man.”
On a human level naturally it’s hard for us to separate anyone we care about from that place in our lives be it family or friend. Yes, if I have a daughter I want her to have every opportunity she can, or for my little sister to become a computer engineer like she always talks about. That, however, is because she is someone deserving of the same opportunities of any person. Her defining value isn’t because she has a specific relation to me or anyone else, but because she, too, deserves to live in a world where she can be everything she dreams of.
