Chole Breyer
Executive director, Interfaith Centre of New York
Were you to stop someone in the street and ask them if the world’s great religious traditions would help or hinder the achievement of gender equality, my guess is they’d conclude that religion was a hindrance. In Christianity and Judaism, the first book of the Bible, Genesis, describes Eve emerging from Adam’s rib. A few lines later, she succumbs to the serpent’s temptation, takes a bite of the forbidden fruit and offers it to him. For centuries, authorities within the church patriarchy attributed to Eve the majority portion of guilt for the original sin and taught that the pains of childbirth were just atonement for Eve’s misstep. With so many obstacles like this within many religious traditions, what possible hope could there be for gender equality unless humanity becomes less religious?
There is an alternative. I’d propose that a less religious world is not one in which gender equality will be more quickly achieved. Indeed, Christianity has untapped resources when it comes to achieving gender equality: today, it is women of faith who occupy two-thirds of the pew benches in churches around the globe. It is a matter of time before we will share power with men of our faith.
Ellen MacArthur
Yachtswoman and charity founder
I am a sailor and have been, at the pinnacle of my racing career, the fastest solo sailor to ever circumnavigate the globe. Focus, hard work and belief in one’s potential don’t have a gender. Offshore sailing is one of the rare sports that offers men and women the opportunity to compete on equal terms. Was my gender relevant? I never thought so.
This, of course, does not mean that, in the grand scheme of things, gender equality is a non-issue and that we live in a fair, balanced world. But in my particular case, it has no importance, and in fact focusing on that specific element would amount to missing the bigger picture. By analogy, and to talk about things that occupy my life now that I’ve created the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, only looking at one piece of the economic puzzle will not give you the full scope. Taking a restrictive approach to complex issues amounts to flicking one switch on a giant switchboard, not considering its impact on others.
The Ellen MacArthur Foundation aims to accelerate the transition to a circular economy by shifting away from the ‘take-make-dispose’ model we’ve inherited from the Industrial Revolution and talking about a systems-level change. The circular economy keeps materials flowing so they can be used and reused, while waste is phased out.
When it comes to reinventing progress, we need all the determination, creativity, enthusiasm and talent we can get. And these have no gender.
Leta Hong Fincher
Tsinghua University’s Department of Sociology
A century ago, Chinese feminists fighting for the emancipation of women helped spark the Republican revolution, which overthrew the Qing dynasty. After the Communist revolution of 1949, Mao proclaimed that “women hold up half the sky”. In the early years of the People’s Republic, the Communist Party sought to transform gender relations with expansive initiatives such as assigning urban women jobs in the planned economy. Yet those gains are now being eroded in China’s post-socialist era.
So what would gender equality in China look like? All parents would welcome their baby girl into the world as much as they would a boy. They would give a plot of family land or an expensive apartment not just to the sons, but to daughters as well. Young women applying to university wouldn’t need to outscore men to gain admission. The state feminist agency would no longer shame single, professional women over the age of 27 by calling them “leftover”. Women who report domestic violence wouldn’t be blamed for “exposing family ugliness”. Half of the country’s leaders would be women. Is gender equality achievable? Yes. It may take several generations, but it’s worth fighting for.
Nicholas D. Kristof
Columnist for The New York Times
We’ll know we have gender equality when we’re no longer talking about it. One of the problems with journalists and humanitarian organisations is that we’re sometimes so focused on problems that we don’t adequately acknowledge the progress being made. And that progress on gender issues is pretty stunning.
Look at the education gap. In the United States it has disappeared, with girls doing better than boys in school. Globally, the education gap in primary school has disappeared as well, and although it persists in secondary school, it is diminishing.
In the US, rape and other kinds of sexual violence seem to have diminished significantly (as best we can figure from flawed reporting). Domestic violence is now often taken seriously by American police departments and more and more police departments abroad are starting to tackle it as well. Sex trafficking remains a huge issue around the world, but traffickers are now sometimes going to jail.
It’s striking that every aid and NGO now seems to market itself as focused on women and girls. Even in the State Department and the Pentagon, officials recognise that a focus on girls’ education is useful to bring about stability and change. So I imagine a world a couple of decades from now where sex trafficking is largely behind us, where girls have as much chance to go to school as boys, where reproductive health for women isn’t a taboo.
Naina Lal Kidwai
Head of HSBC India
The reality of gender equality is complex and diverse, even more so in India. What’s theoretically simple‚ that men and women have the same rights and opportunities in every walk of life, is more difficult to implement and measure.
An increasing number of companies today tend to recognise that a healthier gender mix makes for good business, helping talent retention and enhanced innovation.
What must also be recognised is the revolution in the smaller towns and villages that is even more important, as it will impact a larger number of women. hsbc has given me opportunities to interact with rural women in India, and I have seen their contributions and progress‚ albeit at a slow pace‚ at close hand. Once a woman steps out to earn her livelihood, she becomes independent—and not just economically but psychologically. She gains better control over the family’s finances and acquires stronger decision-making powers.
With a rise in the number of schools and vocational training centers, women everywhere now have the opportunity to gain knowledge and acquire skills. As a result, we see women from smaller regions in India becoming engineers, doctors and even astronauts, which was unimaginable a few decades ago.
I remain optimistic on the ever-greater participation of women in public, corporate and political decision-making.
Ronan Farrow
Writer, diplomat, special advisor to Hillary Clinton
I grew up with seven sisters.
I tolerated boy bands. I learned to put the seat down.
I also witnessed the power of women’s leadership. My childhood dinner-table fights would still be raging without steely negotiation from girls.
Years later, watching an argument rage in a dusty Islamic classroom in Dhaka, Bangladesh, I remember seeing that same power. At first, only the men talked. But finally, Nipa Masud, seated in the back with a dangerous glint in her eye, leapt to her feet, unleashed a torrent of critiques. The floodgates open, every girl spoke up, swiftly ending the debate. The girls didn’t speak first, but they spoke loudest.
There can be no confronting our challenges without those voices. Countries with more women in their governments are less likely to suffer internal armed conflicts. Goldman Sachs projected that levelling women’s and men’s employment rates would add 9 per cent to the US’s GDP, 13 per cent to Europe’s, and 16 per cent to Japan’s.
In some ways, we are closer to securing equal space for women to participate than ever. Gender gaps in primary and secondary education rates are closing. More than half a billion women joined the workforce in the last 30 years.
But women everywhere still face senseless obstacles. In October, militants in Pakistan shot at 15-year-old Malala Yousafzai for her activism supporting girls’ education. Countless stories like hers never reach the world.
It is up to all of us to protect women, their rights and their opportunities. In a recent McKinsey survey of successful female businesswomen, an overwhelming majority said they don’t aspire to top positions. Women who have made it to the top need to stay there and fight for a world where Nipa, Malala, and countless girls like them are not just able, but expected, to lead.
Caitlin Moran
Author, How to Be a Woman and Moranthology
Gender equality simply means women being equal to men however nuts, dim, deluded, underachieving or ill-kempt the men may be.
I mean none of this to belittle menfolk. On the contrary. As a woman, that’s the bit I want in on. That’s the sweet stuff. For, when we imagine the fully emancipated 21st-century woman, we’re apt to think of some toned, immaculately dressed overachiever, leading a Fortune 500 firm while bringing up bilingual twins. And that’s what simultaneously stresses women out to the point of living on a pinot grigio drip, and terrifies insecure men. This idea of perfect, sexy, superhuman lady-titans, winning at everything. That’s what scuppers moves toward gender equality.
For my feminist money, I don’t see gender equality as women exhausting themselves to be more incredible than other human beings have ever been at any other point in time. Mainly, because it sounds a) pretty unlikely to happen terribly often and b) like a massive administrative headache. For me, true equality would be getting in on that male, 14-pounds-overweight-but-I-do-not-care, getting-sexier-as-I-get-older, confidently-chipping-in-at-meetings-with-crazy-ideas, I-definitely-need-some-golfing-me-time action, instead.
While an important part of equality is to have extraordinary people’s achievements facilitated and recognised‚ whatever their gender, sexuality, ethnicity, religion, or ability to accessorise‚ an even bigger part of equality is for everyone to be comfortable being a massively average schlump. This, clearly, is not the case for women.
Naomi Wolf
Author, Vagina: A New Biography
When I hear the words ‘gender equality’ or ‘feminism’, I am always baffled as to why these concepts should ever be contentious. They are so mainstream, so much a part of our cultural heritage. What gender equality or feminism should mean, I suppose if the former is the goal, the latter is the process‚ it’s the logical extension of core democracy.
I date my feminism to the Enlightenment to Mary Wollstonecraft, who wrote, at the end of the 18th century, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Her essay aligned with Enlightenment thinkers‚ appeals to reason, the rights of man, to the notion of equality, of dignity among all people. A vision so powerful, so right, that it’s spread around the world.
But what that belief set isn’t is as important as what it is. It doesn’t prescribe lifestyles. It doesn’t dictate sexual decisions. It isn’t defined in terms of cultural battles. True feminism empowers anyone to be free, to have equal opportunity, access to equal legal rights and the rule of law. But it doesn’t dictate what that free person should do with her or his freedom. Unfortunately, Western feminism is too often bogged down in cultural battles, in asserting a checklist of political policies. For two decades, I have been insisting that there can certainly be a right-wing, a libertarian, and a left-wing feminist agenda‚ because what makes a ‘feminist’ is not the policy outcome. Democracy is a concatenation of voices arising out of many individual free lives.
I think we need to reassert our Enlightenment heritage in the fight for gender justice in the West. The feminists of Africa, Asia and the Middle East have now outstripped Western feminists as pioneers for gender justice‚ partly because they don’t see women’s fight for justice as pitting them against men, against family life or even against faith. They draw on the Wollstonecraftian heritage of democracy and human rights, which is very hard to dismiss.
