Day Eleven - Economics & Work
Four years ago rageprufrock began the first 14 Valentines and she spoke of how women are praised in song, worshiped in poetry, and derided in culture. She spoke beautifully and elegantly of women, comparing our bodies to luminous flowers. She spoke of the state of women, and the need to remember what we go through, what women throughout the world suffer through.
We are daughters, sisters, mothers, and lovers. If we choose, we can bring life into world with our blood and nourish it with our bodies, but the world that we helped create, that women have bled for and fought for and cried for, doesn't recognize us. Our history is one of abuse. We are not safe.
Women suffer from domestic violence and rape. We are devalued. We are taught that we are lesser. There is still so much work to do, so much for us to accomplish.
Women are being killed the world over, suffering from infanticide, dying from lack of medical care, killing themselves in the fight to be what society tells them they must. One in three women will still experience sexual assault in her lifetime. So much has changed and so much has stayed the same.
Forty years ago we declared that Sisterhood is Powerful, and it still is. We must remember that, must continue moving forward.
It's 2010 and we've come so far, but there is still more work to be done. We deserve better, and we can do more. We're strong. The next fourteen days is meant to remind us of that. It's our time to take back our bodies.
V can stand for vagina, like Eve Ensler's groundbreaking monologues. V can stand for violence, under whose auspices all women continue to make a home.
V can also stand for victory.
Sometimes no matter how hard we try to find the right words, someone else has beaten us to the punch and written the perfect thing. The following is from the United Nations Population Fund's page regarding Gender Equality and Empowering Women.
Women’s Work and Economic Empowerment
"In nearly every country, women work longer hours than men, but are usually paid less and are more likely to live in poverty. In subsistence economies, women spend much of the day performing tasks to maintain the household, such as carrying water and collecting fuel wood. In many countries women are also responsible for agricultural production and selling. Often they take on paid work or entrepreneurial enterprises as well.
Unpaid domestic work - from food preparation to caregiving - directly affects the health and overall well being and quality of life of children and other household members. The need for women’s unpaid labour often increases with economic shocks, such as those associated with the AIDS pandemic or economic restructuring. Yet women's voices and lived experiences - whether as workers (paid and unpaid), citizens, or consumers - are still largely missing from debates on finance and development. Poor women do more unpaid work, work longer hours and may accept degrading working conditions during times of crisis, just to ensure that their families survive.
The differences in the work patterns of men and women, and the 'invisibility' of work that is not included in national accounts, lead to lower entitlements to women than to men. Women’s lower access to resources and the lack of attention to gender in macroeconomic policy adds to the inequity, which, in turn, perpetuates gender gaps. For example, when girls reach adolescence they are typically expected to spend more time in household activities, while boys spend more time on farming or wage work. By the time girls and boys become adults, females generally work longer hours than males, have less experience in the labour force, earn less income and have less leisure, recreation or rest time."
By far, one of the most effective and practical solutions for empowering women economically is microlending. This concept embraces a very 'every drop counts' philosophy,: microlending programs extend small loans to very poor people for self-employment projects that generate income. These loans range from the tens of dollars to thousands of dollars, but the impact that each loan can have is monumental in the lives of the recipients, the vast majority of which are women.
Over the last decade, the Grameen Foundation has been building a network of partners around the world, and through those partnerships has been able to assist over nine million people with loans to aid them as they work towards financial stability and independence. Like many such programs, the Grameen Foundation focuses its efforts particularly on women. Unlike many such programs, the Grameen Bank shares the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize with Muhammad Yunus, which is a clear statement on the effectiveness of their program and the impact that their work has on a global stage.