This Month in Gender Equity: October 2019
We return this month with our series that recaps our favorite (or least favorite) moments in gender equity from news, media, and longreads all over the internet. You’ll see installments for This Month in Gender Equity the third week of each month. If you have ideas or contributions, leave a comment or tweet at us!
How well are K12 schools dealing with sexual assault cases?
This heartbreaking article details the case of a girl in New York who was forced to attend school with her rapist despite a restraining order against him. The story is hard to read and it is even harder to grapple with the evidence that comes to light as the article goes on. The article states that “the rules for dealing with sexual misconduct and assault in secondary schools are often not clear—if they exist at all—leaving victims to feel powerless and educators to wonder about the proper steps to take.” This is a terrifying thought for those of us who work with children. How can we, as educators, protect our kids from situations like this without clear guidelines from our schools? Though obviously we want to think this could never happen at our schools, we know that is not the reality. Does your school or district have ways of addressing these issues? Does your state? Or are students forced to continue to attend classes in situations such as the one in the article? It is certainly worth finding out.
A Bill of Rights for Girls at the UN?
On October 10th, six girls went to the United Nations to propose a new document, called The Global Girls’ Bill of Rights. The document came from focus groups brought together over the summer of 2019, involving more than a thousand girls around the world, and was synthesized over WhatsApp by a group of 15 girls. Some of the rights that the document would secure include freedom from exploitation, decision making about their bodies and their sexuality, and safety from all forms of violence. Though it is a sad commentary that these rights need to be spelled out, it is impressive that these young women have put together this document and are pushing to make the world a better place for girls and women. Let’s hope that the UN does their part and that this will be one more step towards female equality across the world.
Nirmala Sitharaman and Nobel Laureate Esther Duflo have one thing in common
You may recognize one of these names: Esther Duflo is an MIT professor who just won the Nobel Prize for her work in poverty reduction along with two of her research partners. She is the youngest person to receive that award, one of only two women ever, and the only living woman to possess the Nobel in economics. There are lots of things you could say there about the pipeline for women in Economics and the ways in which women’s opportunities are suppressed in STEM fields. Those are important but we’ll save them for another day because, overwhelmingly, coverage of Duflo’s accomplishment lists her as the wife of co-winner Abhijit Banjee. Yes, one of her research partners happens to be her husband. But that does not negate her own profound accomplishment and—really—her marriage is immaterial to the context of her award or the research for which she was recognized.
The author of this article identifies a connection to Nirmala Sitharaman, India’s first full-time female finance minister, who was recently criticized in a national newspaper’s opinion section. The author, another economist, happened to be her husband. The author of this article concludes that professional women tend to get short shrift no matter their relationship status: “If you are unmarried and in the public eye, your sexuality and morality will constantly be deconstructed....And if you are married, how can you not be subsumed within that institution, to first be someone’s wife and then anything else!” It has become perfectly clear that women are capable of immense accomplishments despite gender inequality, but the tiresome conversations about their partners continue to rob their accomplishments of the attention they rightly deserve.
-Amy and Lauren