Today an estimated 122 million youth are illiterate globally, out of which 60.7 percent are young women according to a UNESCO report. More than 1.3 billion people live in abject poverty and then there is also the current devastating refugee situation the world over from Syria to Burma, among the numerous issues afflicting mankind. All...
Category: Articles
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En-route to Public Transit Safety for Women
The ability to move freely and have full control over movement plays an influential role in a womans economic emancipation. It is not untrue to claim that true empowerment is only possible through improved mobility which enables women to take control over their lives, have access to education, markets and exposure to information. That said,...
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The trade of gendered vulnerabilities
Theres a reason why Liam Neesons movie Taken has captured our attention as its terrifying premise of losing ones daughter to a powerful international human trafficking syndicate hits a raw nerve in every parents mind. And while we would like to think that the government is doing its job to protect its citizens, news of...
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On Gendering the Media
Women have suffered more by the hands of chroniclers than history itself! The importance of inclusivity is now being acknowledged not only in how the story is written, but also by whom it is actually penned. While this realization has dawned upon us quite late, and progress, albeit at a snails pace, is underway, women...
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Beauty is never #nofilter
How many times have we heard ourselves saying: Beauty is only skin deep and Dont judge a book by its cover, and actually believing it? Many times, I suppose, especially during our impressionable years and then faithfully, we hold on to them even as we find ourselves learning just the opposite. The recent brouhaha over...
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Commodifying Woman Through Time
Gender inequality is an issue deeply entrenched in modern society stemming from various factors including poverty, lack of and inadequate access to education, or illiteracy; history bears witness to its existence since time immemorial. A brief look into Greco-Roman myths and Eurasian history will show how the female sex was perceived in the pre-Socratic, post-Aristotelian...
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Seeing poverty in the mirror
By most accounts, I would be a statistic in studies linking gender with poverty. After all, female heads of households like me, supporting their children on their own, are a fixture in studies and researches on the feminization of poverty. In fact, lone mother households or single-mother families are considered to be at the highest...
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In search of entrepreneurial diversity in Pakistan
Pakistan is a country with a troubled economy, a dismal state of socio-political affairs, and it is a nation simmering with colossal dissatisfaction. Ranked 146th out of 187 countries on the UN Development Programs 2013 Human Development Index a comparative measure of life expectancy, literacy, education and standards of living for countries worldwide, Pakistan...
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On Accepting Violence Against Women
Whenever I come across news of a woman being sexually assaulted, or a girl being molested, my mind wanders back into my life as a social science teacher, conducting classes in both cultural anthropology and sociology, among other things. I remember one sociological reading I assigned to each of my classes every semester taken...
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Women Engendering Peace
It is a fact that we live in a world stricken with hunger, conflict and disease. While more than three billion of the world population lives in poverty, earning less than $1.25 a day, 90 percent of the victims of modern warfare are civilians. Even though ascertaining specific numbers of civilian casualties of war, both fatal and/or...