Are we really creating balance or another Gender crisis?

This has been nagging me for quite sometime now. I have been one of the champions in supporting women move from one level to another in their career, faith even personal lives.

I have always been the over thinker, I tend to look at things to a depth that sometimes others don’t seem to see , and maybe even doesn’t exist but this had given me a unique ability to see things from a different point of view that in most cases get me to trouble. :)

Let me go back a little bit, we have had a number of revolutions, from innovations, to political, to social and all, looking at the innovation point of view, the revolutions have also come with the price, like the climate crisis ie: the air pollution that China is facing, the melting of ice the world is facing, the increasing of the ocean acidity and tempreture etc. All these as the result of our revolutions.

In all this I learn that as humans, we sometimes focus on just one point at a time to solve what is at the moment facing us, without looking at the ways we could solve the issue without bringing up another new problem as the result of our solutions.

According to United Nations on why we need to achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls:

• Globally, 750 million women and girls were married before the age of 18 and at least 200 million women and girls in 30 countries have undergone FGM.
• The rates of girls between 15–19 who are subjected to FGM (female genital mutilation) in the 30 countries where the practice is concentrated have dropped from 1 in 2 girls in 2000 to 1 in 3 girls by 2017.
• In 18 countries, husbands can legally prevent their wives from working; in 39 countries, daughters and sons do not have equal inheritance rights; and 49 countries lack laws protecting women from domestic violence.
• One in five women and girls, including 19 per cent of women and girls aged 15 to 49, have experienced physical and/or sexual violence by an intimate partner with the last 12 months. Yet, 49 countries have no laws that specifically protect women from such violence.
• While women have made important inroads into political office across the world, their representation in national parliaments at 23.7 per cent is still far from parity.
• In 46 countries, women now hold more than 30 per cent of seats in national parliament in at least one chamber.
• Only 52 per cent of women married or in a union freely make their own decisions about sexual relations, contraceptive use and health care.
• Globally, women are just 13 per cent of agricultural land holders.
• Women in Northern Africa hold less than one in five paid jobs in the non-agricultural sector. The proportion of women in paid employment outside the agriculture sector has increased from 35 per cent in 1990 to 41 per cent in 2015.
• More than 100 countries have taken action to track budget allocations for gender equality.
• In Southern Asia, a girl’s risk of marrying in childhood has dropped by over 40% since 2000.

This brings me to my current topic, I understand that with these numbers we are still way far behind from achieving gender balance in many aspects of life, from business, social, professional etc. And being one of the champions of this I will always push for more hence supporting and working with initiatives like Help To Help, SheFound, Girl Next Door, UNWomen etc.

Stop right there and hear me out, the initiatives we are taking now are creating a wave of very powerful, amazing women who live up to their full potential and it’s perfect, the only issue is that we might have to dance this dance a little longer or in other tunes very soon because the approaches we are using are still not inclusive enough.

I love the HeForShe initiative for one reason, it is bringing its own side of inclusivity in all matters gender, yet I still feel we need to do more. We are raising our girls to be self-sustaining, yet we are not preparing our boys how to live with women who are powerful, self-sustaining and supportive. We are still raising our boys with the mindset that women are weak, they will need you and the moment a man feels like all he is taught to do is done by the woman he is interested in, he gets so confused, defensive or just give up because he doesn’t feel there is more he can offer.

Having a son myself, I’m very concerned on how to raise him to be a great man, to not be intimidated by powerful women, instead, to celebrate them and understand that they compliment something in his life as much as he does to theirs. I want him to be okay with his baby sister’s prosperity without being intimidated by it.

I wish we teach our boys that they are heroes, there are also female heroes and it’s normal to be on the same battlefield with a badass female hero. According to international boys day , Current research tells us that Boys:

1. are 50 % more likely to fail meeting basic proficiency standards in reading than girls.
2. are 2 times more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD compared to girls
3. are more likely to be the victims of violent crime
4. are severely behind girls in school grades. Boys take 70% of D’s and Failed grades.
5. suicide rate is four times higher than girls
6. are 5 times more likely to end up in juvenile detention, and 85% of those detained boys grew up without a father figure present in their lives

This is one scary thing, that we might just need to focus our work on both sides from now on before we find ourselves with another crisis. Being a woman, who is still facing challenges because of being one, I wouldn’t want any of my children be it female or male to face challenges just because of their gender or fail to live with the other gender because that is not something they are prepared for.

A Call for action for all Gender Balance Champions, to look at this matter from deeper lens. Let’s start by Celebrating Boys Day (16th May) and Men’s Day (19 November) and keep on celebrating Father’s Day (16th June)

Halla me, tell me what you think at : Vanessa Kisowile