In honor of International Women's Day, IREX sat down with Nobel Peace Prize laureate and women's rights activist Leymah Gbowee to get her views on the opportunities and challenges facing the global women's movement as well as the role of men in the struggle for gender equality.
"Everyone is talking about girl power," Leymah Gbowee said, dubbing the past 10 years "the decade of the woman." She went on to list groundbreaking achievements by women around the world--Joyce Banda being elected the first female president of Malawi, the election of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf as the first female President in her own country of Liberia, and the role of women in the uprisings in Egypt, Lybia, and Tunisia, to name a few.
"We have the camera on us," she said, speaking about the global women's movement. "The opportunity to maximize this is great." But the challenge, she noted, is what to do in this new space. "Women do not sit down as women to say 'this is our plan of action.' We haven’t really gotten to that stage yet."
When asked about how to get more men involved in the struggle for gender equality, Ms. Gbowee replied that all too often meetings of activists are women talking solely among themselves. "It's like the choir or the converted just talking to the converted. I think it's time we opened up some of these women's spaces. Bring in men so that really there's an understanding of why we do the work that we do...what we are going through or what the complexities of our lives are...."
One way to encourage more men to be allies is to expand how the movement frames gender issues. "[L]et’s talk about reproductive health and rights. Let’s talk about the benefits that you as the man stand to gain if your wife practices these safe reproductive methods. Let’s talk about the benefits you gain as a father if all of your daughters are educated, and they are not married off early. These are things that we need to start to talk about."
Given Ms. Gbowee's expertise as a peace activist, we also asked about the role of women in peacebuilding and how international organizations working in post-conflict settings can best support these efforts. She stressed that when women are left out of the early stages of the peace process, they are also left out when it comes time to build a democracy. "Everyone wants to see the women out dancing when the peace agreement has been signed," she said.
"[I]nternational organizations start to look at women’s involvement in the actual hard peace process at the end." She said that organizations and governments need to ask, "[H]ow can we get the smart women in a room to start to think through their involvement in the peace process, post-peace process, and even during transition leading into democracy?"
When asked what should form the core of advancing the gender agenda in her home country of Liberia, she listed access to justice, political participation for women, reproductive health, and the passing of a domestic violence law as some of the key items. Despite Liberia having a female president, women on the Supreme Court, and a female justice minister, she said, "There's still a lot that needs to be done. So, I cannot give you one specific thing and say 'this is it.' We still need to work."
Where does the women's movement go from here? Ms. Gbowee said that it's important for women globally to look at the social, political, and economic gains they've made and then ask themselves, "For the next 10 years, where do we want to find ourselves?"
IREX thanks Ms. Gbowee for her insights and for her ongoing work for peace and gender equality. Learn more about IREX's gender [7] work and our programming in Liberia [8].