It was Saturday night and Josh and I were eating at one of our favorite Italian restaurants. I asked him what he thought of the new Christopher Hitchens book he’d borrowed from me. “I prefer your writing”, Josh said between mouthfuls of spaghetti. I laughed out loud. “Honey, you are the only person on the planet who would come to such a conclusion”, I said.
And then I started thinking about the Write to Change The World OpEd project I’d attended that day where there were so many stories shared of women who belittled their talents and achievements. I pulled myself up, sad that, even if I wasn’t in the Hitchens league, I’d been so quickly dismissive of myself. Hence the reason for the project, to give women the confidence to write OpEd pieces on issues and ideas in which they were expert in order to restore the balance of women’s voices and expertise into the commentary of influential papers, magazines and online posts. The tipping point was determined to be 15,000 women – and under represented male voices – signed up for the training in the US.
At present 85% of all key commentary forums pieces in the US are written by men, mainly white men from Ivy League colleges – women aren’t stepping up and assuming their expertise, power and influence. And yet women have been the force of major change – we were reminded that Arab Spring was catalyzed by a woman who created a YouTube video at home. We were told that words have consequences and that if we didn’t want to have consequences, we would remain inconsequential. We had to get over our fear of self and share our knowledge and expertise from the viewpoint of ‘mattering’.
The project was founded by an inspirational woman called Catherine Orenstein, who is an opinion leader on media and mythology and who wrote a best selling book on the myth of Little Red Riding Hood. Catherine led some of our training that day although the majority of the day was led by Katherine Lanpher, an award winning journalist who is tough and funny and direct in her teaching and feedback. The have 70 to 80 editors across the country whom we will have access to for the next year as our mentor pool for any pieces we write. These mentors are journalists who have committed to giving an hour a month in support of this project. And now the project is finding extension through colleges including Yale, Stanford and Princeton too.
I want to take the OpEd project to Australia and so we’ve started talking about how to raise the funds to make this a reality and they will help me place an OpEd piece in the Australian or Sydney Morning Herald on my own experience of the workshop. Then I’d love to help it go global, given how few women’s voices are read or heard in media in developing countries.
In the same way that this OpEd project elevates women’s opinions and expertise, so our work at Women’s World Banking gives women genuine ownership of their livelihoods, and real power in their lives. However, our annual survey shows that when the loans from micro banks become larger, a smaller percentage goes to women. They opt out of the system because they don’t want to go to big institutions, or their husbands are mobile and take on the loans instead so the women become a means to an end rather than the loans helping them directly. For girls in developing countries, they have less access to money at an early age than boys, which keeps them in a cycle of dependency and much more exposed and at risk. So we’ve got to support women to stay financially independent rather than opt out and we need to give girls the opportunities to start their own savings accounts earlier so that their choices are expanded and not diminished in relation to education and their future.
This is the week of the Clinton Global Initiative Annual Meeting and also our two day Board Meeting. It’s also the week of the UN General Assembly and of just about every other gathering of influence. And Australia’s new Global Ambassador for Women and Girls is also in New York this week. So there is a lot happening.
Fall is here and there’s a crispness to the air and a sense of energy all around. I’ve been dancing around to 60s music in the evenings, infused by the spirit of Greenwich Village – and you can imagine how thrilled I was to find that Godspell is returning to the stage here next month! And Josh gave me a ukulele so I’ve been plucking at that, feeling musical. I also bought myself a dress that looks and feels like wearing feathers (though I promise you I’m not). It reminds me of the quote from Emily Dickinson – ‘hope is a thing with feathers’ and when I put it on I feel lovely and light.
I have two weeks to go see the Statue of Liberty before she is closed to the public for a year while renovations take place. I saw her at a distance last week as I looked over the water and saw her torched arm stretched out. Her torch reminds me of the Danish Government’s Millennium Development Torch to honor those who are advancing the cause of gender equality. ‘Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free …’ says the inscription under the Statue. ‘Give a break to the women who constitute the mass of the tired and poor in this world’, I think. ‘Lift your lamp beside your golden door and give hope to those women’. I look across the harbor again – there she is…a beacon of humanity. Time passes until the lights are winking across the harbor, and our Statue of Liberty stands tall. I see the wingspan of a bird hover over her, I can even imagine the sound, soft as a feather.
Jane