On Friday 11 October, it was International Day of the Girl Child which was set up by the United Nations in 2011. The aims are to focus attention on the need to address the challenges girls face, and to promote girls’ empowerment and fulfilment of their human rights. I shall share with you some of what I communicated to the girls at assembly this week.
Every day at Queenwood, we celebrate the rights of our girls.
On 11 October every year, we also remember the 1.1 billion girls across the world that bring into relief that the exceptional rights we enjoy in Australia are far from universal.
This year, the theme for the International Day of the Girl Child was “girls’ vision for the future”. The United Nations describes the theme as a call for both “urgent action and persistent hope”.
The statistics are overwhelmingly alarming, showing that young girls globally are disproportionately disadvantaged.
Twenty percent of girls don’t finish lower secondary school.
Ninety percent of girls in low-income countries have no access to the internet.
Over the next decade, 110 million girls worldwide will risk being trapped in child marriages.
Adolescent girls continue to account for 75 percent of all HIV infections globally.
Whether it’s economic, environmental or political, the issues are multigenerational and far-reaching.
A poor education limits a young woman’s ability to support herself financially and is a lifelong limit to her health, her employability, her social status and her family’s future education.
Digital exclusion prevents girls from learning and connecting. With their male peers twice as likely to be online, this entrenches gendered disadvantage.
The disadvantage for girls is not only overseas. Closer to home, young women in Australia are still at a disproportionately high risk of sexual violence: One in five Australian women over 15 will experience sexual violence over their lifetime, compared to one in 16 men.
So, where’s the hope?
Mao Zedong isn’t my go-to for inspiration, but he did coin a terrific quote: “Women hold up half the sky”.
Source notwithstanding, the words help us to flip the narrative from oppression to opportunity. What an extraordinary impact 1.1 billion girls could have on the world, if we collectively fight to end gender inequality.
For me, that’s our bright and shining hope.
I also see that, from our place of arguable privilege, there is more that we can achieve than we think.
As a school, in protected Mosman, in blessed Australia, it’s easy to think: ‘What could we possibly do?’
For one, I’ve always believed that we should give in proportion to the ways we’ve benefited. Give money to reputable funds, frequently, generously and wisely.
Some of the work we’re doing through Queenwood is also feeding, indirectly, into global change, such as the national award-winning initiatives being led by Mrs Paola Tamberlin, Director of Community &Culture. Through this work, we’re addressing intergenerational disadvantage, with an immediate flow-on effect to families both now and with the intention to set up foundations for people better equipped to navigate their futures.
Remember, too, our influence as one of 550 member schools of the International Coalition of Girls’ Schools (ICGS). Next year, when we welcome international delegates to our Educating Girls Symposium during our centenary celebration, we will be actively advancing the education of girls and young women. Like Queenwood, a central tenet of the ICGS charter is to advance girls’ education, in the case of ICGS, it is a global commitment to assist, through the education of our girls and their potential influence in the future, the plight of girls who are not as fortunate as students in the member schools of the Coalition.
The longer I work with and get to know our women of the future, the more optimistic I am about their potential power for good. I only wish, a lot of the time, the media would reflect the good that we see in our young people every day. While they sometimes get things wrong in their little day to day world, as do we all, their hearts and minds are in the right place and in partnership with you, their parents, we will work to develop those in our care to be the best people we can.