As a teacher, the end of the school year can be both completely hectic and ridiculously boring all at the same time. Filled with standardized tests that require me to sit in a room for hours on end, it seems like all of my time is both used and wasted all at once. Perhaps even worse than the eternal boredom of testing season, sitting in a silent room for hours on end tends to lead my brain to some weird places. Because I’m an enneagram 1 and am endlessly concerned with the issues of the world, without happy distractions my brain heads toward incredibly depressing places pretty quickly.
Thus, this weird time warp meant that the end of May came faster than I’d realized and without a lot of self-care. Tired and scrambling to meet my deadline for this month, I ran into a nearby coffee shop that doubles as an independent bookstore and hoped to find a book that would be interesting enough to write about, but also easy enough to avoid continuing the downward brain spiral that I’d entered the past two weeks.
Thank god for coffee shops that double as independent bookstores.
Inside that wonderful sanctuary of caffeine and literature, I stumbled upon Saadia Zahidi’s Fifty Million Rising: The New Generation of Working Women Transforming the Muslim World. Even though the book was more dense than what I probably should have gotten (I bought this book on May 28th), I was riveted by the initial story with which Zahidi began her book. She opened with the perspective of her ten-year-old self seeing a woman working in a traditionally male role for the first time in her home country of Pakistan. This one experience led Zahidi to pursue a life of education and a career in women’s equality.
Even though this book was by no means the light read that I’d initially wanted, the information seemed irresistible to my starved mind and fit perfectly into a conversation that I’d had with my mother only a few days prior. Although I can’t remember how the conversation started, it ended with a discussion over my mom’s fear of Islam because she viewed the religion as being inherently derogatory toward women. Her comment led to a long conversation in which I discussed my experiences with Muslim women with whom I’d attended college.
Many were from majority Muslim countries, but some were from America. Some were more “traditional” and wore hijab, others did not, but all were incredibly empowered women. Although the conversation ended in a positive place with my mom reworking her thoughts on the issue, much of what I contributed was all anecdotal evidence. I lacked the actual facts and figures to support my personal experiences.
What I had not known is that beyond the encounters I’d had with strong Muslim women, there is a much larger movement of women’s empowerment taking place in majority Muslim countries. And through this movement, these incredible women are driving cultural change around the world.
Fifty Million Rising
Saadia Zahidi is a Pakistani-American author, Harvard graduate, and Head of the Centre for the New Economy and Society at the World Economic Forum. She co-authors Forum reports on Human Capital, Gender Gaps, and the Future of Jobs and is the recipient of numerous honors and awards, including being listed as one of the BBC’s 100 Women in both 2013 and 2014. Although Fifty Million Rising focuses on women in the Muslim world, Zahidi’s interests extend to all data pertaining to education, income inequality, and promoting equality in the workplace. Many of her recent interviews also address issues of inclusion and workers’ rights in the U.S. as well as other countries around the world.
It was the constant comparison of majority Muslim countries to the U.S. that so riveted me throughout Fifty Million Rising. An incredibly statistic heavy book, it became difficult at times for me to plow through the numbers and process them in a productive way. Yet, Zahidi continually broke down these numbers, drawing her audience back to what we know—our own personal experiences—by comparing how these countries look next to their Western counterparts.
Although Zahidi never asserts that these majority Muslim countries have created a perfect world of gender equality (far from it in many cases), she often reveals deep, unresolved issues in America that are being actively addressed in Muslim majority countries, but actively ignored here. For example, Zahidi notes that all of the Muslim majority countries that she studied for the book “offer some maternity leave, and in 80 percent of the countries 100 percent of wages are guaranteed during the leave.”
Thus, in countries where women are almost without exception expected to occupy a more traditional role in the home, governments have stepped in to fill the gap between these expectations and the need for women in the workplace. Meanwhile, America remains one of the only developed countries without a guaranteed right to paid maternity leave, regardless of the fact that many women are still required to manage similar cultural expectations around child-rearing and home-making.
Yet, stigma toward Muslim women remains. Whether it is our reaction to arranged marriages or mandates to wear the hijab, it is easy for Americans to target aspects of a different culture and to congratulate ourselves on our own progress, even if that progress is superficial. Zahidi notes repeatedly throughout her book that there is a direct correlation between women in the workplace and positive economic growth both for a company and a country. Thus, both countries and companies in these Muslim majority countries have discovered that investing in women is not simply good from a philanthropic perspective, but good from a business perspective. As I read the overwhelming evidence that Zahidi provides for women’s inclusion, I couldn’t help but wonder, “Where is this same investment in America?”
In light of the recent political upheaval over women’s health in America, I want to emphasize the ways in which I needed this book. I needed to hear the ways in which other women are making change and finding success. I needed to see the fruition of women’s work. In many ways, I find it particularly depressing to watch women’s protests in America. It seems the more we speak and fight, the more people roll their eyes and tell us that our issues aren’t a real concern.
In moments like these, where everything feels so incredibly hopeless, it is so necessary to seek out stories that bring us hope. Sometimes that hope can come from complex female characters in our favorite works of fiction, fighting off evil and saving the day. But sometimes that hope needs to come from real badass women—real women who are extending a hand to us, spurring us onward in the work of changing the world.
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