Are we meeting our goals?
Our students celebrated the United Nation’s (UN) International Day of the Girl (11 October) last week and this week - they declared their individual support of girls’ rights to education by raising their arms and proclaiming ‘Because I am a Girl’ in support of the Plan UK campaign.
Plan UK, one of the largest children’s charities in the world, created the ‘Because I am a Girl’ campaign to support millions of girls in securing the education, skills and support they need to transform their lives and the world around them. This is a notion that we are very familiar with; our own Foundress, the Venerable Mary Ward, recognised the need for women to have access to education over 400 hundred years ago and we continue to address this need today. The charity has now created an inspirational video to support its campaign which includes footage of 13 girls from eight countries performing a dynamic rendition of ‘Yet’, a poem by British writer and performer Keisha Thompson. Each of the girls in the video strongly believes that International Day of the Girl could be a launch pad for global action on girls’ rights.
This sentiment is crucial; any international awareness day must be part of a greater profile-raising agenda. We must be mindful that October 11 is not just a day’s focus pronounced by the UN four years ago: it’s a movement. So, year on year we, as an international all-girls school, show our support for this special day, but the issues raised by International Day of the Girl – access to education, women’s rights to work and equal opportunities, to name a few – are all on-going and need to be attended to with a more permanent focus to bring about sustained change in societal attitudes. While social prejudices across the globe continue to prevent girls from gaining an education, at St Mary’s School, Cambridge we do all we can to articulate a strong vision for independent and healthy young women, whether that’s through supporting women’s rights initiatives, including International Day of the Girl, by promoting inspirational role models (within our community and local heroines as well as national and international ones) in our school community, or through our pastoral support.
Some may remember my blog last academic year where I spoke about the eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) – which range from halving extreme poverty rates to halting the spread of HIV/AIDS and providing universal primary education, all by the target date of 2015. I stated then that we were in serious danger of failing to meet goal number three related to women: “promoting gender equality and empowering women”; it is clear that this goal has not been met. That’s not to say that progress hasn’t been made; over the past 20 years there have been improvements. More women are holding political office, fewer women are dying in childbirth and FGM is firmly on the agenda BUT over 37,000 girls are still forced into marriage every day, among many other gender discrepancies.
In 2013, 49.59% of the global population were women and in 81 countries women constitute a higher % of population than men. It is shocking to think that women are never a minority group in terms of raw numbers but in most countries they constitute the silent majority and yet there is still a way to go before equality reigns supreme. At the UN Sustainable Development Summit in September countries adopted new sustainability goals which are due to build on the eight MDGs already agreed but it is paramount that women remain central to this agenda. As a Guardian journalist eloquently wrote: “Equality has advanced but parity is clearly a long way off in most parts of the world.”
For our part we are doing all we can to encourage our students to succeed – and being an all-girls’ school, empowerment and breaking through glass ceilings are at the top of our list. Mrs Susan McKay, a teacher at St Mary’s Junior School, Cambridge is attending two fascinating conferences over the coming weeks. The first is this Friday, the Educating Girls Symposium, Developing Leadership Through Wellness and Mindfulness in Los Angeles. Discussions at the symposium will revolve around the intersection of leadership, resilience and wellness in teaching and working with girls. The best practices developed at this conference will continue to inform the education of our students. Mrs McKay has also been invited to the RoundTable Global ‘Finding Balance’ Summit in partnership with Patron Akie Abe, First Lady of Japan. The Summit is invite only and the school has been asked to contribute to the global conversation around empowerment and equality; a group of our Sixth Form day and boarding students will also be attending.
Dr Janka Skrzypek, Assistant Head of Sixth Form and Assistant Housemistress is another of my esteemed colleagues who talks to our students on topics such as empowerment and issues affecting young women. She says: “Body confidence and academic pressures are only some of the challenges faced by girls today. While our impact on what is expected of us in terms of how we look and perform academically is somewhat limited, what we have a lot of power over is how we perceive, work through and manage those very expectations. Two qualities that can help us deal with any positive or negative pressures related to our bodies and brains are resilience and confidence, both of which stem from the ‘This girl can!’ attitude. Throughout their time with us, and with an input from their personal tutors, boarding staff and pastoral staff, our students learn how to manage the high expectations they have of themselves as well as any expectations put on them by others, inside and outside of school, allowing them to excel in all that they do.”
It’s absurd to think that we would ever have an International Day of the Man or Day of the Boy, yet the cynic might comment that it is deemed a political necessity or a panacea for us to have International Women’s Day and International Day of the Girl. I don’t know which perspective is the more disheartening! More optimistically, one can take these days at optimistic face value as an opportunity within a girls’ school to educate and to celebrate. It is these awareness days which should remind us, in connection with the wider agenda that we need to, and will continue to, raise the cause of, and therefore the profile of, women’s empowerment through modelling optimistically what that might look like in terms of self-confidence and self-belief – in the classroom; in the workplace; in the home; and in a country on the other side of the world.