Day of the Girl

Celebrate the girl child, an often unappreciated and undervalued resource in many parts of the world!

Empowering girls, and the women they'll become, leads to increased prosperity, stability, and quality of life. Don't believe me? Here's some reading for you:

"The benefits of implementing [gender equality] go beyond the immediate effect on the lives of women (one half of the world’s population); the managing role she plays causes the effect to be multiplied through her children, family, community, country and continent producing what is termed the multiplier effect." -- from the "Multiplier Effect."

The UN agrees. So does the World Bank.

Who doesn't? The Muslim Brotherhood, Russia, Iran and the Vatican. 

It's clear that raising girl babies, educating girl children, employing women, and giving them agency over their lives, will result in a net benefit for society as a whole. Will it create local negative effects for boys and men? No doubt about it. Boys will see more competition at school. Men will have to face the same in the workplace and political spheres. At the household level, husbands will have to share the decision-making with their wives (exactly what the Muslim Brotherhood fear) and will shoulder a greater share of domestic work.

There are backlash effects for women, too: Unintended Consequences.

Those are the oscillations that come with any great social change, though, and they will taper off as gender equality becomes integrated with (and integral to) a given group of people.

All children - boys, girls, and in-between - deserve to be celebrated. They are the cornerstones of humanity's future. Today, however, let's single out the girls and give them an extra boost. For most of human history, the girls have been in the margins, good for nothing but producing more babies (preferably boys).

Today is the International Day of the Girl.

The World We Live In

When we think of personality traits, we find a gender divide in the words most often used to describe typically cis-male and cis-female people. In terms of positive adjectives, men are strong, confident, competitive, brave, unrelenting, stoic, and unemotional. Women are soft, kind, nurturing, compassionate, empathic, sensitive and modest. Obviously these are not universal characteristics, and certainly not truly gendered, but they fit a stereotypical and traditional value system.

The trend in women’s liberation has been to get women to embody more of the typically male positive traits. We encourage women to show less emotion, to be more confident, and to be more physically aggressive. This is, naturally, what women must to do succeed in a male dominated world. In order to play with the boys, you have to be able to act like them. In order to impress your male boss, you need to behave like an aggressive, hyper confident male. Men who embody more of the feminine characteristics, on the other hand, are expected to fall into the “nice guys finish last” bucket.

Let’s think for a moment about the world we live in, and the type of world we’d like to live in. Overall, the trend in human society has been to expand the segments of society to which basic human rights are granted, and then to expand the definition of basic human rights. These days, the only type of violence allowed against another human being is in the name of war or law. Even rape is (mostly) illegal, when once it was a natural spoil of war, much as slaves were.

Civilization is gradually moving from valuing “male” attributes to “female” ones. While we still place great emphasis on certain male traits, how much of that is due to the fact that men dominate the power structures of the world? As women gradually intersperse themselves into executive positions, and I do expect this to take centuries, perhaps we’ll come to live in an ever more compassionate, violence free society. In this future world, empathy and sensitivity are not bad words, and women and their “female” ways are valued as much as their male counterparts. In other words, it’s a world where nice guys and girls can succeed in life.

Everyone Wins

I’m aware that the purpose of many of The Atlantic’s opinion pieces are intended to provoke commentary and generate traffic. In and of itself, that’s not a bad thing. The world needs more analytical thinking, and if even a fraction of that traffic engages in some critical thought, society will benefit. I do wish, however, that they would steer the conversation in directions that are controversial in a more positive manner. This article is a case in point.

The article’s main thesis questions a basic assumption about paid leave for new Mothers versus Fathers and addresses the potential fallacy, especially in modern times, that one is more useful than the other. This seems sufficiently controversial and socially progressive by itself. Unfortunately, it stumbles by trying to make the benefits of paternity leave into a competition:

“While paid paternity leave may feel like an unexpected gift, the biggest beneficiaries aren’t men, or even babies. In the long run, the true beneficiaries of paternity leave are women, and the companies and nations that benefit when women advance.”

First of all, don’t “companies and nations” include men and children? Second, how exactly are they going to accurately measure a fuzzy word like “benefit” to the point that they can rank who receives the most? Instead of wasting time picking a fight about this, our focus should be on the fact that this policy should improve everyone’s lives in some way. Men will feel less pressure to return to the workplace, women will face less discrimination by being “baby tracked,” and even those without babies will reap the benefit of retaining a greater percentage of female talent. The policy would especially help the lower socioeconomic levels that are sometimes overlooked by feminist policy making. When both parents are working to make ends meet, giving paid paternity leave is a financial boon which defers day care costs without reducing the net household income.

The article then goes on to say this:

“paternity leave [...] is a brilliant and ambitious form of social engineering: a behavior-modification tool that has been shown to boost male participation in the household, enhance female participation in the labor force, and promote gender equity in both domains”

All of those results sound great, but quite a few men don’t need to be engineered or psyched into spending more time with their children. Many are already frustrated with their work-life balance, and their numbers are increasing. Was it really necessary to use words that, dare I say, patronises men and possibly alienates the women who are partnered with these men, never mind gay male parents who adopt. The rest of the article presents a sound, cogent, and sometimes impassioned argument in favor of paternity leave, but I nearly missed it all because I was so irritated by these two passages.

We cannot avoid biology (until someone invents a reliable artificial womb), and that means women are the baby makers and need time off work after giving birth. What we can change is the attitude that women are more naturally suited to the raising of children than men are. Women are socially conditioned to the role just as men are led away from it, but that needs to stop if we are to achieve gender equality in all spheres of life: home, career, and child care. Antagonising men by making social change into a competition isn’t going to help bring it about. Emphasizing the point that all of society, including the men, will benefit tremendously just might sway some opinions.