In the midst of Pakistans political affairs hub, a group of 11 working women ambitiously gathered at a local dhaba (a small tea shop traditionally considered a mens-only place) to support and participate in a brilliant movement #GirlsAtDhabas to reclaim public spaces for women as they hope to change the mindset and reclaim Pakistans public spaces. The...
Tag: gender
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Celebrating the #DayOfTheGirl
International Day of the Girl Child (Day of the Girl) is celebrated annually on October 11 to highlight issues concerning gender inequality facing young girls. This years theme is The Power of the Adolescent Girl: Vision for 2030. There are nearly 600 million girls aged 10 to 19 in the world today, each with limitless...
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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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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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Feminism has fought no wars
The last 8th of March, 2015 marked yet another Womens International Day, reminding me once more that it cannot be mere coincidence that this date – which happens to coincide just one day after my own birthday embodies one of my lifes greatest causes: women. As I woke up the day following, my birthday,...
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REPORT: Women Unemployment in MENA
Today, in both UN and World Bank reports, the Middle East and North Africa region scores the lowest of any global region when it comes to employment, with a rate of 10.6% across the whole region. Unemployment is particularly striking among women populations; in fact, only one in three young Arab women between the ages...
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REPORT: Climate Change is not Gender-Neutral
Climate change is a serious problem. It becomes even more serious when it impacts different populations disproportionately. Between 1990 and 1999, two billion people across the globe were affected by natural or technological disasters, comprising more than 600,000 fatalities worldwide. More recently, in 2013, a total of 96.5 million people across the globe were directly...