Kristof is experimenting with using social media entertainment to educate and inspire a new generation.
‘It will be vaguely analogous to FarmVille. You’ll have a village, and in order to nurture this village, you’ll have to look after the women and girls in the village. Actions in the game will also have real-world effects. In other words, there will be schools and refugee camps that will benefit if you do well in the game.’
For all of you gamers that also want to support women’s education and refugee camps. So cool!
reblogged from poptech source: mothernaturenetwork
“Workers are dropping out of the labor force in droves, and they are mostly women. In fact, many are young women. But they are not dropping out forever; instead, these young women seem to be postponing their working lives to get more education. There are now — for the first time in three decades — more young women in school than in the work force.”
How is this impacting the economy and the workforce as a whole?
— China’s making some money these days—but it’s people are still quite repressed. (via newsweek)
“RIYADH, Saudi Arabia — Women in Saudi Arabia will not need a male guardian’s approval to run or vote in municipal elections in 2015, when women will also run for office for the first time, a Saudi official said Wednesday. The change signifies a step forward in easing the kingdom’s restrictions against women, but it falls far short of what some Saudi reformers are calling for. ….Despite the historic decision by the king to allow women the right to participate in the country’s only open elections, male guardian laws in Saudi Arabia remain largely unchanged. Women cannot travel, work, study abroad, marry, get divorced or gain admittance to a public hospital without permission from a male guardian.”
North Indian ‘Apni Beti’ Program Strikes a Blow Against Child Marriage
In a cement-walled room at the end of a rutted road in the rural Indian district of Bhiwani, a teenage girl named Lado sits in a shaft of sunlight and talks confidently about her future. “I want to be a math teacher,” says the 17-year-old, her printed green scarf falling on to her lap. “I tell my parents, ‘Do whatever you want, but educate me. Let me go to school.’”
Welcome to the front lines of the fight to stop child marriage in a country where nearly half of all girls wed before age 18. The weapon of choice: cash.
Lado is part of an innovative program called Apni Beti Apni Dhan, or Our Daughters, Our Wealth. Launched in 1994 by the northern state of Haryana, the program gives poor families 500 rupees ($11, the equivalent of less than half a week’s pay) when a daughter is born, and also deposits money into a savings account. If the girl turns 18 unwed, she is eligible to redeem the bond, worth 25,000 rupees (roughly $500, or one third of an average yearly income). The earliest of the program’s approximately 150,000 enrollees turn 18 next year, offering a rare chance to study whether the program offers a solution other states—and countries—can use.
Whether it can be tied directly to Apni Beti or not, child marriage is on the decline in Haryana, which saw an 18 percent drop in the practice between 1992 and 2006. Haryana community workers say that thus far none of the program’s beneficiaries have been married off by their parents, who know of the program’s promised payout. The girls must sign for the bond, but it is likely their parents will have control of it because of social norms, and most of the girls say they want their parents to use it for their education anyway.
The question is a tough one, and really, it all depends on where you look and what your media of choice is. Some outlets clearly are better or more objective than others are when it comes to shedding light on the current state of women’s equality. Overall, the media is doing a good job of bringing to the forefront many issues that affect women, such as pay inequality. However, it is lacking in other areas.
While men were the clear losers during this recent recession, or ‘Mancession’ as it has been named (a ridiculous play on words, but what can you do?) the equally absurdly titled ‘hecovery’ has supposedly left women out in the cold. Both Forbes and the Huffington Post ran articles in the past week about the recovery and women’s place in it.
Though the media has done its work in bringing the plight of women in the workplace to the forefront, it could be argued that they are confronting the wrong issues, or overstating what they are bringing to print and TV. MSNBC had a brief piece on the ‘mancession’ and ‘hecovery,’ Deborah L. Jacobs ran a piece in Forbes, and the Huffington Post also ran an article talking about women’s inability to recover along with the men in this ‘hecovery.’ These pieces seem to point out that women are once again lagging behind in being hired or rehired. Deborah Jacob’s piece references an Institute for Women’s Policy Research (IWPR) report early in her article, but right there on the front page of the IWPR, there are statistics that show that the reverse could be true. According to the study, she references, in November women gained 65,000 jobs in the workforce, while men gained only 55,000. Another piece by, oddly enough a man, Greg Burns of the Chicago Tribune outlines the woes of men in the workplace.
It is all about perspective I suppose, especially when it comes to the workplace. What is harder to slant is the still evident disparity of pay between men and women. That may be a subject for another story however.
While women’s rights are more in the forefront in the past couple of years, this could have something to do with the fact that the 24-hour news cycle has become a force in and of itself. Combine this with the fact that there are more women in the media than ever before, and you can see why women’s rights are being talked about a fair amount. There are more female correspondents in the workforce, so their opportunity to bring attention to the public is much greater.
One avenue that is clearly getting a great deal of attention, and it isn’t misrepresented, is the plight of many women in third world countries and the women that reside in the countries where we are currently fighting wars. It doesn’t take long to run across an article from any media outlet about the conditions that women in Afghanistan, Iraq and other parts of Southeast Asia and the Middle East face.
A venue in which women’s rights are being misrepresented or overplayed is the election cycles of the past few years. Take Hillary Clinton for example. During the last presidential election, several things that were seemingly harmless were quickly called chauvinistic or misogynistic and people were playing the gender card quicker than a joker on nickel poker night. On the flip side, this year when Herman Cain was facing scrutiny for his alleged infidelity and sexual harassment history, he and his supporters quickly attacked and demonized the women which further pushes women’s rights into the background.
In short, or by now in long, women have much more of a voice in the media. The major issues that severely affect women are being represented and represented well. The issues closer to home such as women’s rights in the workplace, pay differential and sexual harassment seem to be lagging behind. Perhaps these issues are being overlooked because of the strides made by women in the media and without.
—
R. Singh
Sources:
http://www.iwpr.org/
http://www.forbes.com/sites/deborahljacobs/2011/12/06/economic-recovery-is-gender-biased-study-suggests/
http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2011-12-02/site/ct-oped-1103-workingman-20111202_1_job-training-decline-in-manufacturing-jobs-degree-gap
Afghan Women Remind World Leaders: Don’t Forget Us
Afghan women say that they want and welcome peace, but they do not want it at the cost of their right to work and go to school.
Read more here.
Interesting info video by the Economist Online about Egypt—women may work outside the home, go to school and university, and are free to vote and run in all elections but still lag behind in education and the labour market. What are your thoughts? What are the barriers that still prevent women from achieving parity?
“Sometimes you see your own country more sharply from a distance. That’s how I felt as I dropped in on a shack in this remote area of the Mekong Delta in Vietnam. The head of the impoverished household during the week is a malnourished 14-year-old girl, Dao Ngoc Phung. She’s tiny, standing just 4 feet 11 inches and weighing 97 pounds. Yet if Phung is achingly fragile, she’s also breathtakingly strong. You appreciate the challenges that America faces in global competitiveness when you learn that Phung is so obsessed with schoolwork that she sets her alarm for 3 a.m. each day.”
-From “Girls Just Want to Go to School” - Nicholas Kristof
