Woman Power

Yesterday, a colleague of mine sent me a link to an interesting article from Newsweek / The Daily Beast. In this article, "Why the Global Economy Needs Businesses to Invest in Women," the authors, Melanie Verveer and Kim Azzarelli, highlight the growing commitment of the corporate world to act more intentionally in light of their newly accepted insight that the global economy needs "the other 51%," namely women. The article points out that the business world has slowly realized what the development experts have experienced and many ordinary folks have long intuitively suspected: that a society’s progress is closely linked to how active a role women play within it. As the article states, “This [women as players in the economy] was an important theme at the World Economic Forum in Davos last week which hosted a plenary session entitled "Women the Way Forward."”

In an effort to try to enlist significantly more of the 51%, an unlikely alliance of corporations, governments and non-profits have launched a worldwide effort. On February 1, the Third Billion Campaign began its efforts to reach the goal of one billion women as members in the global economy by 2025. The campaign’s title encapsulates the belief that the impact of women over the next decade will match, or surpass, the world change brought about by the 1 billion plus populations of the countries of China and India.

Imagine the transformative effect on the world’s way of doing business with 1 billion women as active participants at the corporate tables as decision makers. It may even surprise the business leaders at Davos.

Nancy Wales, csj 

Looking for the Patterns that Connect—Celebrating International Women’s Day

In her poem "The Low Road," Marge Piercy points out the advantages of looking for the patterns that connect.

Two people can keep each other sane.
Three people are a delegation, a committee, a wedge.
With six you can rent a whole house, eat pie for dinner with no seconds.

It goes on one at a time.
It starts when you care to act.
It starts when you do it again when they said no.
It starts when you say We... and each day you mean one more.*

March 8, 2011 is the 100th anniversary of International Women’s Day. In recognition of this anniversary, the United Nations inaugurated the creation of UN Women on February 24 of this year to add energy to the United Nations Millenium goals around poverty and women.

What we know from our own experience is there are many doorways into a vision of equality.

For some the spirituality doorway pushes against old models of authority and worn-out, limiting images and language for the Divine.

For some the door of economic equality and fundamental policy change offers the most hope for change that matters.

Others step through the door of the arts to offer visions of what is almost impossible but which catches our own imagination to make it real.

Still others put their energy into relationships in the family and neighbourhoods, living out new ways to embody a love that is substantial and sustaining.

For others, involvement on a global level keeps them searching for ways to keep people safe, even as solutions to conflict are sought and new ways to ensure participation are demanded.

Still others devote their energy to help promote the education of girls in countries such as Tanzania through a group called TEMBO.

Many women are connecting the dots that connect climate change and the impact on women who live the extremes of poverty in our world.

Our challenge in this fractured world is to keep seeking what connects us; to keep pressing for policy that helps all of us and all species to thrive; to keep naming structures and institutions that exclude; to keep adding, step by step, meeting by meeting, relationship by relationship, to a world where, in the words of Marge Piercy, we say We and know it means all of us.

May each of us keep stepping through a doorway that connects us to the whole.

Margo Ritchie, csj

* fragments from the poem "The Low Road" by Marge Piercy in The Moon is Always Female.

Violence Is All Around Us. Violence Is Within Us.

Inspired by the government of Ontario’s initiative to raise awareness about violence by declaring November as "Woman Abuse Awareness and Prevention Month" and the local "Shine a Light on Woman Abuse" campaign here in London, we decided to dedicate our November blog posts to the theme of violence.

The conversation began a few weeks ago when Barb MacQuarrie, Mohammed Baobaid and I sat down for lunch to talk about initiating an online "trialogue" about violence and how it shows up in us individually and in our world. Over the course of a few weeks we will take turns blogging and hopefully you will enter the conversation.

Violence is all around us. Violence is within us. All three "bloggers" have experience in working in the area of violence/non-violence. Our hope is to learn collectively more than we already know individually.

Lunch together was an experiment. Would we find enough to write about to create a dialogue with one another? Could we encourage others to be in dialogue with us? Did we represent enough diversity of thought and experience to make it interesting? Between the tuna sandwiches and the chocolate chip cookies, we thought the answer to all three questions was yes. From our conversation, this is what emerged as most significant for us:

"I stayed with the importance of the significance of context for better understanding violence and saw how intervention strategies could undermine this factor most of the time." Mohammed

"The way in which disconnection is associated with violence and connection is associated with healing." Barb

"The role of community as having the potential to heal the human penchant for violence and to create alternative ways of being with each other held energy. What does this mean personally and globally?" Margo

All three of us agreed that the most honest and vulnerable starting place was to explore how we each experience and name the violence we discover in ourselves. This might give us further clues to the violence we face daily. Stay tuned as the conversation unfolds. Please join us in this conversation. Be part of creating some new understanding.

Margo Ritchie, csj

Meet our guest bloggers:

Barb MacQuarrie, Community Director for the Centre for Research and Education on Violence Against Women and Children at the Faculty of Education at the University of Western Ontario.

Mohammed Baobaid, PhD, Executive Director of the Muslim Resource Centre for Social Support and Integration and a research associate at the Centre for Research and Education on Violence against Women and Children at the University of Western Ontario.

Margo Ritchie is a Sister of St. Joseph presently engaged in leadership within her Congregation.