People would look to her legacy and say that she was a great woman, but she would be forgotten once the wind blows over, like the ashes of burnt paper convertibles and mansions.
Go read this essay right now! Written by a 15 year old girl from Singapore for a essay competition, if only I was as insightful and talented a writer as she is when I was 15.. or now haha.
It appears that more girls and women are now missing from the planet, precisely because they are female, than men were killed on the battlefield in all the wars of the 20th century. The number of victims of this routine “gendercide” far exceeds the number of people who were slaughtered in all the genocides of the 20th century.
I think when you live in the US it's easy to forget how drastically different, and frankly horrible, it is for some people in other countries. When we think of gender equality here in the states we think about equal opportunity, wages, etc. These women are being regularly beaten, sold and deemed unworthy of proper education or health-care. They are being denied the most basic of humanity.
The toughest part for me to read was the life of Abbas Be, a teenage girl in India who arranged to take a job as a maid in the capital to help her family financially. Only to be "locked up in a brother, beaten with a cricket bat, gang-raped and told she would have to cater to customers".
Brothels make me absolutely sick. The idea of people being held against their will, beaten and forced into repeated sexual acts for strangers makes my blood boil. They treat women as they are pieces of meat.
One of my favorite parts of the article was a story about Bill Gates when he visited Saudi Arabia.
"Bill Gates recalls once being invited to speak in Saudi Arabia and finding himself facing a segregated audience. Four-fifths of the listeners were men, on the left. The remaining one-fifth were women, all covered in black cloaks and veils, on the right. A partition separated the two groups. Toward the end, in the question-and-answer session, a member of the audience noted that Saudi Arabia aimed to be one of the Top 10 countries in the world in technology by 2010 and asked if that was realistic. “Well, if you’re not fully utilizing half the talent in the country,” Gates said, “you’re not going to get too close to the Top 10.” The small group on the right erupted in wild cheering."
Even if you put the emotion about gender equality aside (which I don't think is irrelevant at all) he is absolutely right. The world has big time problems to solve , industry is increasingly becoming a war of human capital, whoever has the brightest and most capable wins out. Can you really afford to ignore half your population?
It's poetic justice that the nations who achieve true gender equality will quickly and decidedly pull away from the nations who don't.
Elite performers in every area of life have one thing in common: they really enjoy what they’re doing. Not in the narrow sense of liking to win, but actually enjoying the act of doing the thing they’re good at doing.
