The host of the show, as the name implies, is Diana Rehm. Her introductory comment about the show is as followed:
"Gender equality is not only the right thing to do, it’s smart economics. This is the message of a new World Bank report on the importance of empowering women around the world. According to the research, women now represent forty percent of the work force but hold just one percent of the wealth. They earn between twelve and eighty cents to every dollar earned by men. And, despite an increase in life expectancy, nearly four million females "go missing" in developing countries every year. However, reducing the gender gap means changing governments on the national and local level. We examine the global economic advantages and challenges of narrowing the gender gap. (Diana Rehm, 2011)"
Diana had three guests on her show, the first being former deputy Secretary of the U.S. Dept. of State, and current World Bank president, Robert Zoellick. I was somewhat skeptical about what he had to say on behalf of the world back and gender equality after learning about those SAP's we talked about in class last week. Surprisingly, I think he is someone on the right side of this work, and does not just seem like an 'arm-chair' researcher. Robert talked about how he has traveled the world and has seen first hand the effects of the statistics his organization came up with in their report on the state of gender equality. I do not really recall what his proposed plan was to fix the problems he documented, but it was good to hear that such a powerful organization as the World Bank is doing something to highlight the issue at hand.
Diana's next two guest were the president and founder of The Kakenya Center for Excellence, Kakenya Ntaiya, and president and co-founder of Women Thrive Worldwide, Ritu Sharma. Both of these women, in organizations way less powerful and well known than the World Bank, inspired me a lot more the Robert Zoellick. These two talked about their own progress they have made in the movement of gender equality and did not just spout out numbers and blanket statements about the state of women today. What I liked most of all was the lack of generalization these women brought to the conversation. Kakenya talked in great detail about her life growing up in a rural Kenyan village where she was told she had a fiance at the age of five and had the prospect of wife in her future stopping her from her goal of education. She recalled how her mother helped her to achieve of goals of staying in school because she wanted a better life for her daughter than the one she was living. Kakenya talked about genital mutilation, children brides, and education discrimination towards the girls in the village. However, her stories were personal, and she never used them to blanket the whole of Africa or even her whole country as being this way. I feel that a lot of GAD writers do this, and use generalization to get their point across. This really bothers me as I think it hinders the movement of women's equality by not really addressing the specific issues that are unique to every community. I think everyone in the class should take the time to listen to her story and think about how local action addressing specific problems in a community can really make a big change.
Thanks Mia for sharing on the Diane Rehm Show that was cast yesterday afternoon. I’m not a fan of radio programs but was caught up by the ongoing discussions between Diane and Kakenya in Washington DC, so unfortunate that it was almost halfway done. Gender and development debates as we said in first seminar are diverse and dynamic, though we have specific story from specific people experiences, a lot of GAD researchers will always give a snapshot overview of realities on the ground. Following Kakenya discussion and her website, I would say she does not represent a typical Maasai girl experiences but had a better childhood compared to other Maasai girls in 1980s and 1990s and therefore, sought to empower Maasai women and girls. First, she talked about doing farming (they were settled) and her dad was staying in Nairobi (meaning he worked in Kenya capital city). Second, her parents were financially able to educate her to high school and being able to apply for Scholarship means she had access to information.
ReplyDeleteI’m not trying to say she didn’t face challenge as a girl because I know she had to go through required Maasai cultural practices such as Female Genital Mutulation (FGM) though little practiced lately as well as escape from early marriage. Maasai community in East Africa were pure pastoralist until recently that globalization has revolutionized even the remotest areas. They never settled anywhere but were always on move along range lands for pasture and water for their livestock. This affected both girl and boy education because boys were in-charge of livestock with their fathers and girls were in-charge of making temporary homested and milking cows with their mothers. Following modernization era, education became priority among Maasai community, since girls were betrothed at an early age, there was no need to educate them for their husbands. Boys were sent to school and girls took the role of boys. With increased feminist activism in Kenya on girl-child education, especially for Maasai girl-child, more girls joined schools and the more they became informed, the more they were deliberated from issues such as FGM and early marriages. When we talk about gender generalization, we must put in account the traditions and cultural practices of a given community. However, ‘empower a woman and you you empire a whole family/community’ it said. I’m so proud of Kakenya, my fellow Kenyan and scholar in Gender issues.
This sounded like an interesting radio show, thanks for sharing Mia! Being that this is coming from NPR, a privately and publicly funded highly popularized U.S. radio network, I am wondering if Kakeyna's story was handpicked because of her experience with women’s abuses like genital mutilation and child brides. I have noticed issues like these tend to attract the attention of not only western feminists but westerners in general because they are disturbing and extremely taboo in nature and thus make the headlines or in this case a very popular radio station. Even though Kakeyna made it perfectly clear that her experience was not necessarily a shared experience of her fellow Kenyans, I still believe this case shows how westerners are framing feminist issues in non-western countries.
ReplyDeleteLast winter quarter in Global Feminisms, we read several chapters from Uma Narayans, Dislocating Cultures: Identities, Traditions and Third World Feminism- it is actually a really thought-provoking book and one chapter in particular caught my attention and changed my perspective on how I see women’s issues in “third-world” countries. Narayan uses this term “border-crossings” in regards to dowry-murders in India, to say how certain non-western feminist issues are not only singled-out under western context but falsely depicted. I have noticed it myself with this radio show and other media outlets, when issues of violence agains third-world woment are brought into western national context, the issues are almost always considered “alien” or “other” and hardly ever pertain to problems affected by western women. It appears that westerners tend to focus on these kind of outstanding issues that ultimately misleads the scope of third-world gender violence.
Overall, there are severe implications to w the power western feminists hold (especially in the media) about what is and is not discussed, who defines reality, what is true or false, etc. Of course, this story is a powerful one to share, I just hope that the audience of this show realize issues like gender mutilation do not encompass all non-western or African women’s lives and that there are other pressing issues that are far more widespread but maybe not as popularized because they aren’t exciting and “newsworthy.”