A Sustainable Model For Women Leadership
Context:
- Throughout the world now, there are 900 million teenage girls and young women who make up a revolutionary generation that will alter how people live, work, and develop. This generation of young women would become the largest group of female leaders, entrepreneurs, and inventors in history if given the chance and resources to develop their 21st century skills.
Indian women’s suffrage:
- Women’s empowerment is largely achieved by granting women the same rights to growth and development in society as those granted to men. The key types or dimensions of female empowerment that are strive after in every profession include political, social, economic, and cultural empowerment.
- We believe that early attempts to nurture teenage girls’ agency, such as exposing them to contemporary skill sets, critical thinking, and leadership qualities, are essential in light of the various socioeconomic challenges they confront from an early age.
- India, which has one of the largest generations of girls and young women, has started a lot of initiatives in the vital fields of leadership development, financial inclusion, education, and health. Also, it has created practical frameworks to help accomplish Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 5, which aims to promote gender equality throughout the world by the year 2030.
Increasing edtech options:
- EdTech gives us the ability to partially close the accessibility gap in education through hybrid learning models, even in contexts where girls’ access to school is restricted by harmful norms. For children and young people, having access to digital technology is increasingly becoming a field of opportunity and a fundamental service. By creating and scaling up solutions catered to the language, cultural idiosyncrasies, and Internet accessibility of certain groups, girls can have equal access to knowledge through digital inclusion.
- Women account up more than 43% of STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) graduates in India, according to the World Bank. Yet, not all of them are represented in the tech industry’s labour and leadership. Although while it seems that girls are showing increasing interest in STEM over time, there are still lingering stereotypes that classify it as a primarily male area.
- Some of the challenges that prevent more workplace involvement from occurring in spite of increasing female representation in STEM disciplines include the following:
- societal expectations that prioritise women over men in domestic and caring responsibilities.
- The public’s perception of men’s leadership in STEM, finance, and entrepreneurial fields.
- Institutional practises such a lack of flexible work schedules, inadequate maternity leave, and a lack of childcare facilities at the workplace.
- To aggressively fight these preconceptions, grade-appropriate STEM, financial literacy, and entrepreneurship programmes must be incorporated into the academic programme for girls. Women can be exposed to real-world applications and inspired to develop solutions to problems in their surroundings by incorporating elements like Olympiads, innovation labs, bootcamps, and competitions.
Healthy growth and physical choices:
- Women must be allowed to make decisions about their bodies, including whether to seek medical attention, when to start a relationship, and when to engage in sexual activity. Also, they must be free from all forms of harassment and abuse.
- Sports activities have a strong correlation to fostering leadership, independence, and teamwork. Young women and adolescent girls can gain a lot from sports participation, including increased self-esteem, improved self-belief, and knowledge of the nuances of teamwork.
- A great amount of success has been achieved by the National Sports Policy and inclusion programmes for children from at-risk neighbourhoods.
Reassigning care duties:
- Strong families, communities, and economies are built on the fact that most women take care of the home and their loved ones. The COVID-19 outbreak, which starkly emphasised the unequal caregiving responsibilities put on women, is one example of an emergency that makes it worse. This was made worse by sociocultural norms in India that subject women to unpaid reproductive labour.
- If we wish to guarantee that women have equal access to economic opportunities and outcomes as men, we must recognise, minimise, and redistribute unpaid care and domestic labour.
- Policies that provide services, social protection, and basic infrastructure, encourage the sharing of domestic and care work between men and women, and expand the number of paid jobs in the care sector are urgently needed to improve women’s economic empowerment.
- Adolescent girls and young women must develop their leadership abilities through a multifaceted approach that emphasises employability enhancement, leadership in athletics, digital innovations and learning, and physical autonomy.
Conclusion:
- Nurturing girls’ leadership potential is our shared first step towards eradicating restrictive gender norms and obstacles to true gender transformative growth and accelerating girl- and women-led progress across the Sustainable Development Goals for India and the rest of the world.
