Good girls speak up

Gender Agenda newsletter Good girls speak up

In the balance of life there’s always good news and bad news. First, the bad: A week ago, an article on the World Economic Forum website said bleakly, “It will take another 134 years to close the Global Gender Gap.” Now, the good: Women and other people of marginalised genders have begun to assert themselves, to speak out, and sometimes shout, as these Anganwadi workers are doing. Sacked three years ago for protesting for salaries that at least met minimum wages, they are still fighting back through courts and in public spaces. One woman says, “Without the fight there are no rights.”

Finally, there is no vanishing point. Women stare directly at the viewer, the bystander, even the man who watches with probing eyes, as the women in cubist artist Pablo Picasso’s Le Bordel d’Avignon did. There is no aversion of the eyes or receding into the background.

It has been 30 years since the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action outlining 12 critical areas of concern, including ‘Education and training of women’, ‘Violence against women’, and ‘Women and poverty’. A UN Women document says, “When women are poor, their rights are not protected and they face double discrimination, on account of their gender and economic situation.”

Fifty years after the UK’s Equal Pay Act came into effect, women workers have taken retailers such as Asda, Tesco, and J Sainsbury, to the court, fighting for this right. The Financial Times writes, “Lawyers say there is potential for equal pay disputes to escalate in other sectors as women are increasingly willing to challenge their employers.”

Elsewhere too, and across causes, women are speaking up. In February, Natasha Akpoti-Uduaghan, a senator in Nigeria, accused Godswill Akpabio, the president of the senate, of sexual harassment. The petition she filed to the senate was struck down on procedural grounds, and Akpoti-Uduaghan was suspended for six months without pay for another matter. “This was orchestrated to silence my voice,” she said, in an interview with The Guardian. Women from across Nigeria participated in a ‘We are all Natasha’ protest. Akpoti-Uduaghan is one of only four women in the 109-seat senate.

There is also a subtle way of speaking out, simply by showing up, like India’s women, who are now participating more than ever in the political sphere, even though gender emancipation is not the sole reason for coming to voting booths.

Women have of course, always spoken out. It is through generations of protests in different ways, bolstered by merit, that we have a swimmer-sport administrator Kirsty Coventry from Zimbabwe, who has been elected president of the International Olympic Committee.