A comment on the women’s day buzz
I don’t like claims like “I hope that my accession to this high office gives confidence to women everywhere” (Irina Bokova, upon her accession to the post of DG of UNESCO). What a clumsy sentence. I don’t know if those are her words or those of the journalist editing the interview but such proclamations taste of self-justifying delusion with an aftertaste of inaction.
I am not questioning that we need role models, but being a role-model cannot be a self-assigned role. One is a role-model if there are actual people looking up to one and wanting to reach that place. And for that, we need action. One doesn’t become a role model by ambition, one becomes a role model by popular acclaim. We need the women in high positions not to be just looked at by others thinking ‘it’s possible’ – we need the women in high positions to engage other women so that when they are looked at the thinking goes ‘it could be me’.
I wish Irina Bokova the best but most of all, I hope she becomes a true instrument of change because she is in a position now to bring something to lots of other people’s best too.
PS: International Women’s day on March 8 every year is a good day to take a minute to think about women as a group, be aware of what they bring and try to engage them more, to think of what it means to be a woman, what we can achieve as a group of people sharing something, etc. – but that’s a whole other topic :)
Tags: Role-Models, Society, UNESCO, Women
This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 9th, 2010 at 12:31 pm and is filed under Development, Education, General, Peace. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
March 9th, 2010 at 4:26 pm
Interesting topic, although it sounds like a chromatic aberration. Women becoming a role model by stepping into a masculine energy to get to great positions possibly aren’t the real role models. I certainly have a lot of respect for them as role models within the current perspective, but what we really need is a shift in that perspective. So the real role models become women who can stand tall within their feminine energy. Isn’t it a bit of an insult to women when they need to become masculine to become a role model or associate with those current role models?
I guess a fashion magazine would say: Don’t ignore the girl inside you;)
Being a man, I might see things very wrong though. After all masculine women are scary, it goes against nature to fight them even verbally. So the easy way out for an insecure man is to not take those strong women seriously. I guess woman might actually see, a man “hitting back” as being taken seriously. But this is from a very very masculine (the old/current) perspective.
Cheers!