Women Empowerment - Why do we care and Why you should too
“What is your purpose?” - in our latest workshop we reflected about this question, what orientates our careers and, at the organisational level, what we stand for. On this International Women’s day, we decided to revisit and share the ‘why’ of our movement to empower early career women across the globe.
At the macro level, women’s empowerment is a fundamental aspect of achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). SDG Goal 5 is specifically targeted on achieving gender equality and empowerment of all women and girls. While progress has been made towards women’s and girls’ empowerment since the time of the UN Millennium Development Goals, we are nowhere near true gender equality and equity with regards to access to education, skills and training facilities, public health, employment, and political participation.
Equality on paper does not translate to equity in participation
Women’s empowerment and the actions that VOICES takes in some ways come down to the difference between equality and equity. In those parts of the world and sectors – and they are still far too few – where women are treated equal to men, the centuries of disenfranchisement of women, particularly in a professional context lead to a divergence between equality and equity. Where men can fall back on established male and patriarchal structures in society, women deserve additional support. Not because women are weaker or less capable, but because current, historically grown, structures still inherently disadvantage women, so that equality on paper does not translate to equity in participation. A stark example of this is the still common gender pay gap. For instance, in both the UK and Germany, in 2018, women on average had a pay disadvantage of 18% across all sectors (data: Eurostat[CH2] ). In other parts of the world, the lack of women and girls empowerment is even more pronounced. A recent first Women’s Empowerment Index for Kenya for example found that 71% of women in the country are disempowered (source: UN Women[CH3] ).
On the micro level, this results in, unfortunately, familiar situations to many young women - the under expectation from superiors, the difficulty to speak up in old male dominated meetings, feelings of inadequacy (imposter syndrome), or even being paid less for doing the same job as male counterparts - the culturally accepted and institutionally-embedded biases.
No time to wait & A way forward
Equality, equity, and parity are all needed to ensure women’s empowerment which in turn is critical for healthy and prospering societies. In 2021, the largest study of women in corporate America - Women in the Workplace - found that although women leaders are more burned out compared to male counterparts, they are increasingly supporting employee wellbeing, diversity, equity and inclusion over the past year (source: McKinsey [CH4]). So what are we waiting for?
Hence, we here at VOICES seek a practical approach to empowerment that does not wait for a societal shift toward less patriarchal structures but gives women additional skills and a community to be able to prosper and succeed in a world where the deck is inherently stacked against them. However, at the end of the day women can only do so much and as long as the current structures remain, individual women will be able to succeed but our society will not have the full benefit of all women’s involvement.
At VOICES, we believe that instead of waiting for a system's change, we can and should raise our voices, together, supporting one another to thrive and live true to our most authentic self while navigating our professional journeys. We collaborate with professionals across the globe to offer free monthly webinars and an online community platform to democratise knowledge and support young women from all walks of life.
[CH1]https://sdgs.un.org/goals/goal5
[CH3]https://data.unwomen.org/publications/womens-empowerment-index
[CH4] https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/diversity-and-inclusion/women-in-the-workplace