Business people, bureaucrats and board members, researchers, equality advocates and journalists — that’s who showed up on February 4th at Ottawa’s Rideau Club for the launch of the Gender Gap Tracker.
Left to right: Shari Graydon, The Honourable Maryam Monsef and Joy Johnson
They came to celebrate the application of big data analytics to achieving gender equality in public discourse. And they stayed to watch an Informed Conversation between Minister for Women and Gender Equality, Maryam Monsef, and Joy Johnson, Vice President, Research at Simon Fraser University. The two leaders’ thoughtful exchange — which you can watch in its entirety here — included equality strategies and candid confessions about professional failures, and how they view those now.
You can read more about the Gender Gap Tracker (what it is, and why it’s necessary) here and here. But the short story is, for four months before launch, from October 1st to February 4th, women’s voices never edged above 26% of all those quoted or interviewed. Since then, we’ve seen brief spikes of 29 or 31%. Visit the site yourself, see how well the news media you rely on are doing, and then click on the media logos to let them know if you’re satisfied or disappointed.
In the meantime, here’s what a few of our board members in attendance had to say about the launch itself the following day:
Editor in Chief of the Conversation Canada, Scott White, offered a veteran journalist’s perspective on the stats
The event was superbly executed, had a strong turnout of folks committed to gender action in different domains, and featured a stellar and authentic conversation between Minister Monsef and SFU’s Joy Johnson…. It’s great to see the buzz on Twitter and the ease with which the tracker works. –Nobina Robinson
I’ve been blissed out since I got home last night. The Gender Gap Tracker is helping us move the conversation in this country in a much-needed, positive direction! – Amanda Parriag
The event was terrific, the room was great, and you succeeded in elevating the work of Informed Opinions. It was an inspiring event. – Evelyne Guindon
The event was spectacular, it’s wonderful to see media and government engagement, and the spoken-word poetry summary at the end was brilliant! – Scott White
It took a diverse team of seriously brainy people to build the GGT
The event also gave us the opportunity to publicly recognize:
Kelly Nolan of Talent Strategy, who first proposed the idea of a big data analytics tool
John Simpson, University of Alberta physicist and digital humanities expert
Maite Taboada, Computational Linguistics professor at Simon Fraser University
Fatemah Torabi Asr, Software Engineer, Computational Linguist, Simon Fraser University
Mohammad Mazraeh, Big Data Engineer, Simon Fraser University
Alex Lopes, Big Data Analyst, Simon Fraser University
Simon Fraser University itself, for investing hundreds of thousands of dollars in developing the research
Roslyn Bern of Leacross Foundation, our most appreciated champion and supporter
Our valued corporate sponsors, who share our gender equality commitment:
Kelly Nolan, Joy Johnson and Maite Taboada all earned their front row seatsInformed Opinions core team and valued patron: from left: Zeba Tasci, Roslyn Bern, Shari Graydon, Samantha LuchukSome of Informed Opinions’ board members, from left to right: Jennifer Laidlaw, Nobina Robinson, Shari Graydon, Amanda Parriag and Evelyne Guindon
This article was originally published in The Ottawa Citizen
We hear a lot these days about how artificial intelligence is taking away jobs and making it easy for foreign powers to hack democracy. But some scientists are hunched over their computers in an effort to harness the power of big data analytics for social good.
A new tool just launched by Informed Opinions is a case in point. We collaborated with a team of researchers at Simon Fraser University’s big data lab to develop a sophisticated digital monitoring system. It’s now measuring, in real time, the gender ratio of sources being quoted online by some of Canada’s most influential news outlets. It analyzes in microseconds what it used to take researchers hours to assess.
If only the data it reveals were more encouraging.
How grim are the statistics? Type gendergaptracker.informedopinions.org into your browser and see for yourself. You can access data as far back as October 2018, but no matter which date range you select, the aggregate percentage of women’s voices never moves above 26 per cent. For context, that’s a mere four-point increase over data we collected almost three decades ago.
And yet, in the intervening years, women have achieved significant advancement in virtually every field. They’ve become premiers and astronauts, Supreme Court justices and university presidents, corporate CEOs and award-winning scientists and entrepreneurs. And while it’s true that more men still lead governments and corporations, our research has found that even in health care disciplines, where women dominate, their voices remain under-represented.
That’s a problem. Women’s life experiences are often profoundly different from men’s. Those experiences feed different insights and sometimes priorities. So it’s not remotely defensible in a proud democracy that men’s perspectives continue to outnumber women’s by a ratio of almost three-to-one in public discourse. We can – and need to – do better.
Informed Opinions last commissioned content analysis research looking at the gender ratio of quoted and featured experts in 2015. Canada’s prime minister had just sworn in a new gender-balanced cabinet, and we were edging towards the #MeToo revelations that would remind everyone of the social consequences of failing to listen to women’s perspectives.
The aggregate ratio of experts quoted in the 2015 study was 29 per cent women to 71 per cent men. But that analysis left out both sports and entertainment coverage. It also included two broadcast talk shows: CBC Radio’s The Current, and Radio Canada’s Tout le monde en parle. Both programs exceeded 40 per cent female interviewees, raising the average stats overall.
In fact, the better performance of public broadcasters on gender parity planted the seed for the Gender Gap Tracker. Because Radio Canada and CBC are explicitly mandated to reflect the country to itself, their reporters and producers pay more attention to diversity. What gets measured does, indeed, get done. Anecdotal evidence and common sense suggest that journalists who actively track the gender of their sources achieve more equitable results. And a growing number are reporting on their performance.
The mixed gender team of scientists developing the Gender Gap Tracker includes researchers from across disciplines. They hail from Canada, Iran, Brazil and Spain and they’ve worked in the U.S., the U.K. and Switzerland. A microcosm of Canada’s diversity, they tangibly demonstrate the payoffs of collective intelligence that benefits from different perspectives.
We’ve set 2025 as the target date for achieving gender parity in Canadian news media. The Gender Gap Tracker, though, is just a tool. To make a difference, journalists need to actively seek to improve the data – and news consumers need to give them reasons to do so.
This article was originally published in TheToronto Star
Could the incentivizing power of a fitness tracker be adapted to help achieve gender equality in the media, enhancing Canadian democracy in the process? After a year of collaboration with a team of big data scientists, we’re about to find out.
Despite the increasing attention paid to the importance of women’s voices, in news media coverage — both in Canada and around the world — male perspectives continue to dominate by a ratio of more than two or three to one. In the days when few women earned graduate degrees, led organizations or were elected to public office, that dominance was understandable. But today? Not so much.
The disparity in representation now makes headlines. In 2012, the BBC convened an all – male panel to discuss breast cancer and teen contraception. The outrage was as swift as it was predictable. But humiliation can sometimes be a galvanizing force: Britain’s national broadcaster has since offered hundreds of expert women free media interview skills training. And last year, it explicitly committed to meeting a 50:50 challenge, aiming to ensure the equitable representation of male and female sources by 2020. Some programs have already achieved the milestone two years ahead of schedule.
In fact, doing so isn’t that difficult. Matthieu Dugal, host of Radio Canada’s La Sphere, reported more than two years ago that his program had featured as many female guests as male — despite its focus on technology. Similarly, Bloomberg has been actively seeking gender balance among its business news sources for several years.
Going beyond established contacts to achieve such diversity takes effort. In addition to searching for new sources, journalists have to actively record and tally their metrics. Several journalists at The Atlantic have written about their own commitment to doing this, and science reporter Ed Yong estimates that achieving gender parity requires an extra hour a week. He calls his monitoring spreadsheet “a vaccination against self delusion.”
In an age of the perpetual news cycle, when many reporters, editors and producers are doing the job of three people, we understand why this might be unappealing. But there are upsides to the vaccination discipline.
La Sphere’s gender parity achievement was accompanied by an increase in the program’s audience share. And The Financial Times recently discovered that reframing one of its electronic newsletters to actively engage female readers inspired higher open rates in male readers as well.
Given social media’s disruption of news gathering revenue models and the need to sustain trust among news consumers, all news organizations should be paying attention to these experiments. Indeed, a collaboration between the World Economic Forum and Internews, a U.S.-based global non-profit, is explicitly aimed at ensuring more women’s voices are included in news coverage, in pursuit of increasing community trust in news.
That’s why Informed Opinions has been working with researchers at Simon Fraser University to put big data to work in the service of democracy. Over the past year, we’ve built the Gender Gap Tracker, an online digital tool that monitors the ratio of male to female sources quoted in Canada’s most influential news media. It features easy-to-read graphs updated on a daily basis reflecting both the performance of individual newsrooms, and the aggregate ratio of them all.
The tool captures only the sources cited on each news outlet’s website; it’s unable to quantify those who might appear in broadcast interviews, but aren’t referenced online. Yet so far, its results mirror the ratios found in previous research done manually. The goal of the Gender Gap Tracker is to celebrate news organizations that lead by example, and motivate those who lag behind. And it offers news consumers and media organizations alike a daily reminder of the remaining gap.
Improving this metric is important for all of us. Good journalism is fundamental to democracy, and the persistent underrepresentation of women’s perspectives denies Canada access to the analysis and ideas of many of its best and brightest. It also undermines policy decisions. Many issues affect women differently; solving complex social, economic and environmental problems requires us to more equitably integrate their experiences and insights.
Diverse, qualified women exist in virtually every field, and for the past nine years, Informed Opinions has been motivating and delivering media skills training to thousands of them across the country. Our free online database of diverse experts committed to responding to interview requests quickly now features more than 800 female sources.
We’re looking for Canadians to join us in reminding journalists that it’s no longer necessary (or defensible) to declare, “But I couldn’t find a qualified woman.”
If 2017 goes down in history as a year of resolve, what will we say about 2018? That we built on the momentum to make lasting change, or that we let the energy dissipate into nothingness?
From women’s marches around the world to the #MeToo movement, many people took not just to social media, but to the streets, speaking up against hate, inequality and violence.
Women, in particular, shared their realities in ways and in numbers that got global attention and sent shock waves through a host of industries, from Hollywood and high tech to policing and restaurants.
But genuine revolution requires persistence: we need to continue challenging unconscious biases, dismantling entrenched systems, and redistributing power. We need to translate last year’s manifestations of resolve into actual resolutions – and then act on them. And we need leaders who are willing to take a stand and publicly spearhead this revolution.
Is that you? Someone you work with — or for?
Here are 5 suggestions for how to keep amplifying women’s voices for change in 2018:
Publicly announce your commitment to support gender equality in the media and donate $1,000 for a tax receipt in support of “What Gets Measured Gets Done”, the high tech dashboard we’re building to track women’s voices in the media;
Ask women in your workplace what’s needed to overcome the barriers to their advancement, and then commit to implementing meaningful measures that will benefit them and your bottom line;
Nominate qualified women from your organization or network who are able to speak to media for inclusion in ExpertWomen, our online database designed to make it easier for journalists and conference programmers to feature smart women;
Talk to us to explore how we might partner with you to amplify women’s voices in Canada and raise awareness at corporate events;
Book a Finding Your Voice, or Building Allies for Change keynote or workshop combining research insights and concrete take-aways with storytelling and humour to engage and motivate your colleagues.
The business case for drawing on the entire talent pool is now unassailable — dozens of studies over more than two decades make clear that including women’s informed opinions makes companies more profitable, boards more effective, and research more relevant.
Most people no longer accept the absence of women’s insights and contributions as defensible; #HeForShe initiatives are springing up across North America; even senior male leaders in the tech and banking sectors have publicly declared their unwillingness to serve on panels made up only of guys.
The good news is that in 2010, when we launched Informed Opinions, the ratio was actually four or five male voices to every female one. So our efforts over the past seven years — training, motivating and supporting hundreds in getting their commentaries published, and many hundreds more in saying “yes” to interviews — have made a difference.
But we’re aiming to move from an average of 29% female sources, speakers and experts to an average of 50% by 2025. While the goal is ambitious, we know it’s achievable, because some news media organizations are already there. And what sets them apart from their less attentive competitors is that they’re paying attention and making an effort.
That’s why we’re now gearing up to launch our What Gets Measured Gets Done campaign.
To achieve our goal of reaching 50% female sources, speakers and experts quoted and featured in Canadian media, we will:
Collaborate with researchers and computing experts to monitor the gender representation of people quoted and featured in influential media, issuing an annual report card documenting progress relative to the benchmark data we already have;
Celebrate the leaders who recognize that democracy demands the news media play a pro-active role, and include diverse women’s voices and encourage the laggards to do better; and
Engage citizens to insist that they do.
We’re launching What Gets Measured Gets Done on October 18th, celebrating the anniversary of the Persons Case at an event on Parliament Hill.
In the process, we’ll recognize the incredible contributions of distinguished University of Ottawa law prof and indefatigable activist, Elizabeth Sheehy.
Although she has been speaking up for women’s legal rights her entire illustrious career, since participating in the second media engagement workshop we ever delivered in 2010, Ms. Sheehy has written and published 23 commentaries and given more than 100 interviews. Her extraordinarily well-informed opinions on issues related to all forms of violence against women have enlightened readers, listeners and viewers on a range of critically important aspects of the criminal justice system, and how it treats women who are victimized.
We’re also paying tribute to the producers and hosts of TVO’s The Agenda. The weekday news and public affairs program has not only helped to lead the conversation about the need for women’s voices in public discourse, it has also demonstrated that journalists who make an effort to include diverse sources — gender and otherwise — can deliver context and analysis that is much more reflective of the diverse perspectives available in Canadian society.
Summer host Nam Kiwanuka will be on hand to represent the entire Agenda team, including regular host Steve Paikin, executive producer, Stacey Dunseath, and all their colleagues, who together have consistently achieved more than 45% female guests for more than two years now.
Here’s how you, too, can make a difference. Please:
Follow us on Twitter or Facebook so you see future campaign pieces as they’re released; and
Contact senior news editors, program and conference producers of the media you consume, and the events you attend to insist on greater diversity of perspectives.
What Gets Measured Gets Done is a business mantra frequently touted by executives as an effective means of monitoring performance and productivity. And millions of people sporting fitness trackers can attest to the motivational power of data to get them moving. You can help us to mobilize that kind of measurement and attention to bridge the gender gap in Canadian public discourse.
(In the meantime, for more on the relevance of “What gets measured gets done” in application to equality, see an earlier commentary published in the Ottawa Citizen on the inclusion of women on boards. Given the report just issued by Osler Hoskin Harcourt last week, it remains discouragingly relevant.)
Support our What Gets Measured Gets Done campaign and help us close the gender gap in Canadian public discourse by 2025. As a charitable non-profit, we’re able to issue tax receipts for all donations.
This week’s Conversation That Matters features Shari Graydon of Informed Opinions, which strives to amplify women’s voices to ensure women’s perspectives and priorities play an equal role in Canadian society.
Graydon regrets that in 2017, women remain under-represented, as experts in the media, while men provide the lion’s share of commentary and analysis. She says, “that it is a profound loss that we are not actively engaging, accessing, utilizing, permitting women to contribute their talents, insights, energies and intelligence to everything we’re doing.”
Graydon points to the U.S. election as proof that women are still treated differently, “it’s very, very clear that the degree of sexism that operated in terms of the coverage and attitudes generally, reinforced by media about Hillary Clinton’s candidacy are still alive and thriving.”
She notes that the more female experts and politicians we see, the easier it will be for all of them to be perceived as competent and treated more responsibly.
Conversations That Matter is a partner program with the Centre for Dialogue at Simon Fraser University. Join veteran Broadcaster Stuart McNish each week for these important and engaging Conversations shaping our future.
It’s often seen as a dirty word, and I usually avoid using it. So when Lisa Kimmel, the general manager of Edelman PR agency recently invited me to debate the merits of imposing a gender “quota” on journalists as a means of increasing the number of women quoted in the news, I balked.
Even though the aim of the social enterprise I lead is explicitly to amplify women’s voices, and I’m convinced that doing so could reshape society for the better, I replied, “Not even I would argue that!”
But faced with the opportunity to provoke discussion in a public forum and cross swords with a journalist famous for her ability to elicit strong reactions, I reconsidered. For the sake of debate, I was willing to risk knee jerk dismissals and engage in the intellectual exercise – even if it did only mean a few minutes at the Rotman School of Management microphone.
Interestingly, the process of building the argument changed my mind. Anticipating the likely objections of the Globe and Mail’s Margaret Wente in order to refute them convinced me of the merits of what I originally deemed an outlandish and indefensible suggestion. I’ll tell you why in a minute. But first, let’s get a few of her arguments out of the way.
Not one to let nuance get in the way of hyperbole, Ms. Wente declared quotas “the most dreadful thing in the world.”
I didn’t have the opportunity to offer some comparative alternatives at the time, but most of the many journalists I know, given a choice between say, being gang raped, sold into slavery, or compelled to quote a few more female sources – even if it did take longer to find them – would happily opt for an imposed quota.
Especially since, as the Globe columnist herself made clear, “We’re not lacking for strong female role models.” In the next breath, however, she insisted on the existence of a mythical “best person” who responsible journalists must seek to quote above all others for any given article.
This is a disingenuous claim. For the vast majority of news stories that benefit from insights offered by an authoritative source, there is no single “best person.” Virtually every event or announcement covered by the media could be given valuable context and analysis by a number of people with informed opinions about related issues or likely consequences. They won’t all give the same context and analysis, and indeed, believing that one individual is necessarily “the best” implies a disturbingly narrow perspective on the potential implications of any given story.
So here’s why a quota on quoting women might actually make sense:
1. BETTER, RICHER ANALYSIS
A raft of respected research makes clear: whether you’re talking about scientific research, corporate governance, or social policy, including the insights and ideas of competent women alongside men leads to greater innovation and competitiveness, improved client responsiveness and better financial performance. More perspectives translate into more empathy and greater collaboration.
Mixed gender teams develop safer drugs and make more ethical decisions. Not because women are better than men, but because they often think about and approach things differently, and diversity is a demonstrated strength. (You don’t have to take an advocate’s word for it: the studies have been funded by independent research councils, conducted by esteemed academics, and embraced by bank presidents convinced that to get the best talent, you have to expand your recruitment pool.
So given the critical role played by the news media, and the complex social, economic and environmental challenges they’re tasked with telling us about, we’d be smart to broaden the perspectives we invite to weigh in and ensure we more often seek the views of people (OK, women) whose brains are apparently wired to consider consequences. The downstream benefits are likely to include more family-friendly policies, stronger communities, and reduced conflict – everywhere.
2. MEN NEED A BREAK:
We know that smart women chronically under-estimate their abilities and, in so doing, often decline to pontificate when given the chance. National Post columnist Jonathan Kay explained this by noting that most women just aren’t arrogant enough to think they have all the answers. Which, you know, seems like a reasonable position for pretty much everybody to adopt.
Rotman debate audience enjoying feminist humour.
“Do we need to point out that being a microphone hog doesn’t always lead to value-added commentary? That we’d benefit from a little more Lang and a lot less O’Leary?”
In fact, responding to the new book about the female confidence gap, New York Times columnist David Brooks recently cited psychological research suggesting that overconfidence is actually the more serious problem (think 2009 financial meltdown). He argued for an approach that would inject women’s tendency for “self-policing into the wider culture”, and asked, “How can each of us get a better mixture of “female” self-doubt and “male” self-assertion?
Centuries of entrenched sexism deemed women intellectually feeble and emotionally volatile. Ignoring for a minute who was responsible for perpetuating such attitudes, think of the pressure that put on men to be the go-to guys on almost everything. It’s past time to relieve them of the responsibility of having to know it all.
3. A BROADER DEFINITION OF NEWS:
Now, it’s true that quoting more women might make us pay attention to other things. But would that be so wrong?
What if we focused less on hockey fights and more on health research? If so-called “women’s issues” got front-page treatment – even when the women being profiled weren’t wearing bikinis? If some of what’s currently deemed “soft” news and relegated to the life section were accorded more importance? If we stopped devoting detailed front page coverage to misogynist murderers and more to the social context that contributes to creating them in the first place?
4. WHAT GETS MEASURED GETS DONE:
Some reporters and producers say they’d like to quote women more often – but how many are really investing significant effort in expanding their pool of sources? Doing so requires creativity, resourcefulness and time, and when you’re on deadline, it’s easier to default to the usual suspects. So I think it’s fair to say that despite claims made to the contrary, nobody is doing “everything they can.”
If they were, they would be calling more of the thousand women Informed Opinions has worked with across the country. Women with deep knowledge on a wide variety of topics who are eager to share what they know…Women with distinguished careers and respected reputations who hold PhDs in economics, political science and marine biology, and boast decades of experience in business, immunology and criminal law…
As the successful imposition of quotas in the academic world and relating to board appointments have shown, if we were to compel reporters to start tracking the ratio of women to men they interview, they would somehow manage to find and interview more expert women.
And that would be demonstrably good for all of us.
NOTE: Edelman has posted a 3-minute video from the event (focusing mostly on Lisa Kimmel’s introduction, and including very brief rebuttals by Ms. Wente and me onto Youtube here.
At least some of the audience’s weeping was laughter-induced. But it was hard to tell how much.
When she was first elected, Vancouver Magazine called Darlene Marzari, “the first civic politician hereabouts to make a full-time career out of trying to do things right rather than just getting them done.”
At the front of the conference room, former B.C. cabinet minister, Darlene Marzari was wearing a red business dress she had regularly sported during her time in office. Astonishingly, she had climbed into the dress AFTER donning her teenage son’s hockey pads. Zipping up the garment without effort, and reinforcing her point with too many disturbing anecdotes to recount, she explained that the weight she had packed on as a politician was necessary armor that allowed her to survive the legislative chamber as a woman.
Ms. Marzari’s illuminating skit – at once wildly hilarious and deeply depressing – took place almost 20 years ago. But the hostility she endured is unpromisingly contemporary. And it’s costing us all.
In the past year alone, Conservative MP Michelle Rempel was labelled a prostitute for perching on her parliamentary desk; Liberal MP Chrystia Freeland was heckled into silence for having a “little girl” voice; and NDP MP Megan Leslie called out the appearance comments and physical touching that she and her female colleagues still frequently experience in their place of work. (Yes, it’s 2014 everywhere else, but pockets of Parliament Hill appear to be stuck back in 1963.)
To be sure, many male MPs are equally appalled by such bad behaviour, and political life has always required a thick skin. But it remains Mad Men territory for women. And at a time of increasingly complex social, economic and environmental challenges, this is bad news for democracy.
Other sectors are bending over backward to increase their appeal to the best, brightest and most diverse work force possible. Banks, law firms and universities are responding to a raft of research documenting the competitive edge accorded organizations that incorporate skilled women. They recognize the importance of creating workplace atmospheres that will attract top female talent.
But in an age of anonymous online trolls and twitter-amplified personal attacks, entering a political world that remains elbows-up and tolerant of troglodytes is becoming even less attractive to anyone – female OR male – who is more driven by a desire to do good than fight dirty.
And it’s not like the disrepute of politics isn’t deterrent enough. Indefensible patronage, unaccountable spending, inexcusable election practices – they’ve all taken a toll.
It’s time to aim higher.
That’s why Equal Voice and Informed Opinions saluted The Hill Times last week. The Ottawa weekly paper responded to calls requesting that it abandon its annual tradition of polling MPs on the “sexiest” elected officials of the year. This is a small but symbolic act, worth emulating and expanding. And its timing coincides with our joint #respecther campaign – a bid to mobilize Canadians, who overwhelmingly support gender equality and expect genuine democratic debate from their representatives. We’re encouraging all politicians, partisan staff and journalists to embrace the spirit of the newspaper’s decision and promote a culture of respect.
Dissing women for failing to conform to outmoded stereotypes of how a mother or a “lady” is expected to behave is juvenile schoolyard chatter, not political discourse. And those who engage in below-the-belt insults designed to denigrate a rival on the basis of his or her appearance or sexuality isn’t worthy of the label “public servant.”
It’s beyond time to abandon personal attacks and sexist slurs, and to focus energy instead on ideas and policies. Exit interviews conducted with retiring MPs and catalogued in the recently published book by Samara co-founders Alison Loat and Michael McMillan make clear the damage being done. The title alone – Tragedy in the Commons – speaks volumes.
Politicians and their supporters need to aim higher. And citizens? We need to reward them for doing so at the ballot box.
I don’t often shout back at the TV, despite the vast volume of material it broadcasts that I find vile or banal. But last week I couldn’t help myself.
The object of my fury wasn’t Fox News or Sun TV, it wasn’t some retrograde beauty pageant, exploitive reality show, or a crime drama featuring a multitude of victimized women (respecting the fleeting nature of life, I avoid those.)
Instead, my outburst was precipitated by two words uttered by Peter Mansbridge.
CBC’s The National had just finished airing Anna Maria Tremonti’s interview with the inspirational Malala Yousafzai about her campaign for girls’ education — initially in Pakistan, but now around the world.
When Mansbridge re-appeared on the screen, he innocuously referred to this campaign as “her cause”, and I found myself shouting at the TV through tears:
“It’s not just HER cause, it’s the WORLD’S cause!”
Of course, what I meant was, it SHOULD be the world’s cause. And I want everyone to be as outraged as I am about the colossal cost and profound unfairness of failing to educate, support the equality of, and benefit from the gifts and contributions of millions of girls.
Then today, I came across a 2-minute video from the UN featuring dozens of girls from around the world looking into the camera and declaring:
I was not put on this earth to be invisible.
I was not born to be denied.
I was not given life only to belong to someone else. I belong to me.
I have a voice & I will use it. I have dreams unforgettable.
I have a name and it is not anonymous or insignificant or unworthy or waiting any more to be called.
Some day, they will say: this was the moment when the world woke up to my potential.
This is the moment I was allowed to be astonishing.
This is the moment when my rising no longer scares you.
This is the moment when being a girl became my strength, my sanctuary, not my pain.
This is the moment when the world sees that I am held back by every problem and I am key to all solutions.
We so need to help make them right. And one of the ways we can do that in North America, where so many of us are extraordinarily privileged in a multitude of ways — not the least of which is to have access to decades of exceptionally good education — is to speak up ourselves.
We should be ashamed not to. Like living in a democracy and having the capacity to vote, our educational attainment — the knowledge and credibility it gives us — cannot be taken for granted.
Not as long as we share the planet with 250 million girls for whom those rights are denied.
What might you speak up about? Where? And when? Who might you help educate or enlighten by exercising your voice? By making the best possible use of your privilege?
And what would those girls, denied such basic rights, say about women who have such access to education and the means to communicate their knowledge more broadly, but fail to take advantage of it?
Jian Ghomeshi calls it common sense. But will the government listen?
Last week, some of Canada’s most notable women (including Informed Opinions Honorary Patrons, Senator Nancy Ruth and the Rt. Hon. Kim Campbell) launched a formidable campaign advocating that gender-neutral lyrics be restored to Canada’s national anthem. Since then, all sorts of media heavyweights — including the host of CBC’s Q — have championed the cause. And no wonder.
Restore Our Anthem uses a powerful two-minute video to remind Canadians that the original lyrics to O Canada didn’t exclude women, and there’s no reason the ones we sing in 2013 should either. The site includes a comprehensive list of FAQs and timeline of the anthem’s history, and brilliantly showcases the absurdity of hanging on to the outdated words. It even features a user-friendly politician-locator that makes it easy for supporters to write to their elected representatives.
The call for restoring our anthem likely sounds familiar. In July, Informed Opinions launched its own campaign demanding the same change be made to O Canada’s lyrics. Our short, emotionally charged video and accompanying written pieces received overwhelmingly positive support from women and men across the country. But we’re still waiting.
As the momentum behind Restore Our Anthem continues to build, we hope the small change necessary to re-establish a gender inclusive national anthem will follow. Let’s commemorate the 100th anniversary of the initial revisions to O Canada with another change — one that reflects our country’s reality.
To learn more about the campaign, or to add your voice to the growing chorus of Canadians demanding equality, click here.
