Women empowerment myth
Answers
For only $100, you can empower a woman in India. This manageable amount, according to the website of the organization India Partners, will provide a woman with her own sewing machine, allowing her to take the very first step on the march to empowerment.
Or you can send a chicken. Poultry farming, according to Melinda Gates, empowers women in developing countries by allowing them to “express their dignity and seize control.”
If chickens are not your empowerment tool of choice, Heifer International will, for $390, deliver an “enterpriser basket” to a woman in Africa. It includes rabbits, juvenile fish and silkworms.
The assumption behind all of these donations is the same: Women’s empowerment is an economic issue, one that can be separated from politics. It follows, then, that it can be resolved by a benevolent Western donor who provides sewing machines or chickens, and thus delivers the women of India (or Kenya or Mozambique or wherever in what’s known as the “global south”) from their lives of disempowered want.
1. Women's empowerment comes at the expense of men
2. Girls can't do Math or Science
3. Women crack under pressure
4. Women can't be trusted with money
5. Women can't lead
6. A women's health is not a man's concern
7. Girls belong in marriage not school
8. A woman's place is in the home
9. It's a man's world
10. She asked for it.