day 8 - International Women's Day

Today was International Women’s Day! The United Nations’ 2012 theme was “Empower Rural Women – End Hunger and Poverty”. (A fitting theme to go along with this project, right?) It was also the 101^st anniversary of this day, which was first held in Switzerland as a conference to discuss women’s suffrage, their right to work and represent in politics, and to end discrimination. We’ve solved a lot of these problems since 1911; but we’ve still got a long way to go…

Women’s equality with men can be measured by a number of factors: Wage pay, property and voting rights – and of course, education levels. Another litmus test of female equality, however, is in politics: Females enjoy greater representation when there is a proportionate female representation in their system of government. When examined by percentage of representative-level government, Rwanda is first in the world with 56.3% of lower-house (representative) seats occupied by women. (To give you an idea, the United States’ ranking is 78^th.) Check out an interesting article about women’s representation in politics here: Women's Representation in Politics Worldwide.

One more thing – though today was International Women’s Day, this is by no means an issue confined to once a year. Without efforts to ameliorate these problems, the issues women currently face – such as maternal mortality, sex trafficking, and honor killings – are ever-present. So why would we think about women on only one day? We could adopt the spirit of International Women’s Day and work to improve women’s social standings through education every day of the year.

Please consider making a charitable donation to help women's education in rural Africa!

Janna