Why a woman with an education is so scary
Why a woman with an education is so scary
I struggled with what to write for the past few weeks because what do you pick? There’s a fresh, raw conflict in the news, wherever you look, whoever you speak to. It’s in your conversations, in notifications on your phone, it feels like it’s clinging to your skin. There’s only so much you can hide from it, to protect yourself from what feels like endless, relentless, doom and really, which, let’s face it is necessary on many days, but maybe only so much you should stay away from it because ignoring it doesn’t mean it goes away either.
And the common thread running through it all is how unmistakenly and disproportionately, women and children will suffer the most.
When the pandemic was announced nearly two years ago, one of the headlines that soon emerged was the spike in domestic violence cases around the world. It wasn’t the virus — it was this “silent pandemic” that was killing more women in their own homes than a flu whose name we were still learning. And this had always been a giant problem. It’s just that now it had exploded.
Lockdown, in many parts of the world, meant that with schools closing and remote learning coming into effect, more girls than boys were seeing their education disappear as poorer families prioritised the extra costs this involved for a son rather than a daughter. The outcome of this was that many girls were at the risk of being trafficked or married young.
We’re not out on the other side of the pandemic and there are new restrictions to a woman getting an education that have nothing to do with Covid, which made me wonder, a woman with an education must be something to be deeply fearful of. Because an educated woman is a force of good in the world, in her family, in her community. An education is a great equaliser, a powerful catalyst that touches and transforms entire presents and futures.
I’ve seen it happen so many times, to so many women I deeply admire. Dig enough into their stories and you find the point at which they found education, or the other way around, and changed the course of their lives.
And it made me think that the more impossible it becomes for girls to go to school, how an education is defined and how it is delivered will just have to get more creative. I think we’re about to see a lot more of this in the years ahead. We have to. It’s urgent and necessary. Just like the media industry which went through an overhaul with social media, where anyone with a phone and an Internet connection could now become a creator, a reporter, a documentarian — classrooms, community and how we learn as children and adults has to go far beyond what we know it as today.
It needs to grow and turn into something that is immune to shocks so that there might finally be a time when women and children’s education isn’t the first casualty of change or turbulence.
Education is a great equaliser — when you have the privilege of one.
In other news
Read about how hard getting an education can sometimes be in this story by Roli Shrivastava.
Do you know how urgently we need universal education for women in particular? This urgently.
Education on its own won’t fix everything. But it is a big, big start. And simply knowing as opposed to not, or having the tools to be curious to go looking for answers, is such a huge advantage.
In better news
The Harvard Law Review, a prestigious position of a prestigous monthly legal journal, now has its first Latina president. (It only took 136 years for this to happen.)
Jyoti Thottam has been named Op-Ed editor at one of the greatest newsrooms in the world.
And ladies, think about your name before giving it away too easily. But eventually, do whatever you want to. I loved this essay by Aubrey Hirsch.
Today is International Women’s Day. It’s a day meant to recognise and celebrate how wonderful women are. It gets a bad rap for all the pink branding and corporate emptiness the day brings to workplaces and commercial establishments because what women need isn’t another bottomless brunch and a complimentary pedicure.
What we need is equal pay and parental leave, universal access to quality healthcare and education, equal opportunities and the ability to stay out as late as we please, dress how we want and live any way we choose without the threat or danger of harassment or worse.
Among many many other things.
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AA