Empowering Women is The Only Choice – Brighter Kashmir

Woman must not accept; she must challenge. She must not be awed by that which has been built up around her; she must reverence that woman in her which struggles for expression. (Margaret Sanger)

Most of us grew up in a world we have basic civil rights and amazingly, we still live in a world where some women dont have them. Women are not making it to the top of any profession anywhere in the world. The numbers tell the story quite clearly, 190 heads of the state 9 are women. Of all the people in the parliament in the world, 13 percent are women. In the corporate sector, women at the top-level jobs, board seats, tops out at 15 to 16 percent. The numbers have actually not moved since 2002 and are going in the wrong direction.

Even in the non- profit world, a world we sometimes think of as being led by more women, women at the top, are just 20 percent. We also have another problem, which is that women face harder choices between profession success and personal fulfillment. So, the question is, how are we going to fix this? How do we change these numbers at the top? How do we make this different? The answer to this is, keeping women in the workforce. The problem is that women are dropping out.If women do want to stay in the work force, there are three important messages: 1.Sit at the table 2.Make your partner a real partner 3.Dont leave before you leaveWomen systematically underestimate their own abilities, if you test men and women and ask them questions on totally objective criteria like GPAs, men get it wrong slightly high, and women get it wrong slightly low. Women do not negotiate for themselves in the workforce. A study shows that 57 percent of men entering the workforce negotiate for their salaries while only 7 percent women negotiate for their salaries. And most importantly men attribute their success to themselves while women attribute it to the external factors. Because no one gets to the corner office by sitting on the side, and not at the table, and no one gets the promotion if they dont think that they deserve their success, or they dont even understand their own success. Womens empowerment can be defined to promoting womens sense of self-worth, their ability to determine their own choices, and their right to influence social change for themselves and others. Many organizations across the country are working towards this goal of empowering women and making them self-reliant. But its not that simple, because what the data shows, above all else, is one thing, which is that success and likeability are positively corelated for men and negatively corelated for women. We need to believe in ourselves, to reach for the promotion, to sit at the table, and we have to do it in a world, where for them there are sacrifices, they will make for that. We have got to get women to sit at the table.Women have made more progress being in the workforce than they have beingat home. The data shows this very clearly, if a woman and a man work full-time, and have a child, the woman does twice the amount of housework the man does, and the woman does three times the amount of childcare the man does. For people of both genders, if we are going to even things out and let women stay in the workforce, this has to change. Studies show that household with equal earnings and equal responsibility also have half the divorce rate. And if that wasnt good enough motivation for everyone out there, they also have more, they know each other more in the biblical sense as well. There is a really deep irony, to the fact that actions women are taking, with the objective of staying in the workforce actually lead to their eventually leaving. But the point is that what happens once you start kind of quietly leaning back? Every woman has been through this, once she givesbirth to her child, her job has to be really an inspiring one to make her go back to work. Because its hard to leave a child at home. Your job needs to be challenging, it needs to be rewarding, you need to feel like you are making a difference. And if you didnt take that promotion and some guy next to you did, if you stopped looking for new opportunities, if you are going to be bored, because you should have kept your foot on the gas pedal, the ambition has to drive the women. They need to stay in there and stop leaving before time.Women need to keep their foot on the gas pedal until the very day they need to leave to take a break for a child and then make the decision. Decisions should not be made too far in advance, particularly the ones women are not even conscious that they are making. My generation, really, sadly, is not going to change the numbers at the top. They are just not moving, we are not going to get to where 50 percent of the population in my generation, there will not be 50 percent of women at the top of any industry. But Im hopeful that future generations can. I think of a world that was run where half of the countries and our companies were run by women, would be a better world. I think it would be a better world. Once the glass ceiling has been broken, it can never be put back together, however, one would try to do that. The primary victims of all civil wars, are women and children. All these men and women should be free to decide, whether they do or do not want to conceive a child and they should be able to use one of the birth control methods to act on their decision. Over one billion people use birth control without any hesitation at all. Some people worry that the real goal of family planning is to control populations, but these are all side issues that have attached themselves to this core idea that men and women should be able to decide when they want to have a child. And as a result, birth control has almost completely and totally disappeared from the global health agenda. In Uttar Pradesh the largest state of India, their contraception rate is 29%, so what we have created as a world has become a life and death crisis. There are 100,000 women who say they dont want to be pregnant and they die in child birth.India is amongst the nations where women are still not safe, it is necessary to bring the woman empowerment more than ever. The micro-level studies that were commissioned by the Department of Women & Child Development, has made it evident that there is a need for re-framing policies for access to the quality of employment. Strategies will be designed to enhance the capacity of women and empower them to meet the negative social and economic impacts, which may flow from the globalization process. Globalization has presented new challenges for the realization of the goal of womens equality, the gender impact of which has not been systematically evaluated.

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Empowering Women is The Only Choice - Brighter Kashmir