Teaching About Women’s Empowerment

Introduction

Women’s empowerment comes in many different forms. At its core, empowering women is to give women the equal right to participate in all aspects of society. It is boosting their self-esteem, accepting their viewpoints, educating them, and ultimately equipping them to make life-determining decisions. Empowering women is essential to the health and development of our communities. Therefore, teaching about women’s empowerment is important because the only way for women to become empowered is for the youth to become educated on this matter and take action to support women across the globe!

Resources

There are many resources available online for teaching about women’s empowerment. For educators who want to teach their students about topics related to women’s empowerment, U4SC also offers Teaching About Gender Inequality, Teaching About Women’s History (Month), and Teaching About Feminism.

Lesson Plans

1. Women’s Empowerment: PBS LearningMedia has put together a collection of activities and supporting video modules that encourage students to examine the key social and political issues impacting women around the world. Students will explore the topics of social change and social justice, equal rights, and civic engagement. They will also learn about international struggles and understand better how to take an active role in issues affecting their own local communities. The resources in this collection may also be used by teachers showing classes any one of the four documentaries that explore stories of women’s empowerment and leadership around the world—Taking Root: The Vision of Wangari Maathai, Waiting for Revolution, Shayfeen.com: We’re Watching You, and Shadya.
2. Empowering Women – Empowering Children : UNICEF provides a middle and high school unit introducing gender equality with a focus on empowering women and children. This lesson includes the opening activity What Do You Know About Women In The World?, video Gender Equality Can Help Children, a discussion to help students make connections, and a final homework assignment. In the lesson, students will become familiar with the terms “gender equality” and “gender inequality,” understand the basic facts about gender inequalities worldwide, and ultimately identify main ideas about gender equality in a video.
3. Girls Equity and Empowerment Resource List: The Making Caring Common Project from Harvard Graduate School of Education provides a compilation of websites that offer useful programs, research, resources, and/or activities to promote girls’ and women’s equity and empowerment. Accompanying each website is an explanation of its contents. The programs and resources listed include the Geena Davis Institute, Girls Inc., Girls Leadership, Girls Write Now, and many more! 

Articles

1. Four Ways to Empower and Celebrate Women in the Classroom Using SDG 5: Participate Learning provides an article explaining four ways to empower and celebrate women in the classroom using Sustainable Development Goal #5: achieve gender equality and empower all women and goals. The article suggests teachers share positive stories of influential women through history curriculum, promote gender expression in the classroom, incorporate books into class written about women by women, and encourage students to share personal experiences about women who have inspired them. In each explanation, there are resources teachers can download and use in their classrooms!
2. 7 Ways to Empower Women and Girls: World Vision offers a brief article that explains 7 easy ways to empower women and girls. This article emphasizes the significance of providing clean water, supporting girls and women in crisis, using our voices to help keep girls in school, mentoring a girl close to home, investing in a small business owner, helping a new mom, and telling the women in our lives that we care. For educators who want their students to understand more about how they can empower the women and girls in their communities and beyond, this resource will be very helpful!
3. 5 Reasons Why Education Empowers Women and Girls: The Global Campaign for Education in the United States provides a blog post discussing 5 reasons why education empowers women and girls. This blog post talks about how education decreases women’s poverty, gives women more employment opportunities, leads to fewer unintended pregnancies and delayed marriage, improves women’s health, and increases women’s political participation. Educators who are looking for their students to grasp just how big of a role education plays in the empowerment of women should take a look at this resource!
4. Women’s Empowerment ‘Essential to Global Progress’: The United Nations (UN) provides an article discussing how women’s empowerment and gender equality are “essential to global progress” in celebration of International Women’s Day.

Informational Sites

1. Goal 5 – Achieve Gender Equality and Empower All Women and Girls: The United Nations offers a page dedicated to the Sustainable Development Goal 5, which is to achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls. This page has an abundance of information, infographics, related news, and related videos all centered around gender equality and women’s empowerment!
2. UN Women: UN Women is the United Nations entity dedicated to gender equality and women’s empowerment. Their website offers plenty of information related to leadership and political participation, economic empowerment, ending violence against women, peace and security, humanitarian action, and many more related topics!

• • UN Women – Facts and Figures – Economic Empowerment: UN Women provides an article expressing the facts and figures related to economic empowerment. This article specifically covers the benefits of economic empowerment, the world of work, sustainable development, and women migrant workers.

3. Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment: USAID provides information and resources on gender equality and women’s empowerment, specifically related to women’s economic empowerment, gender-based violence prevention and response, and gender and Covid-19.

Conclusion

Teaching about women’s empowerment is very important. Too many girls and women are not given the rights or the means to make their own life choices and participate in the aspects of society that so many of us take for granted. While teaching about women’s empowerment, it is important that educators discuss the role of economic empowerment in the fight for women’s rights and gender equality. By providing women with the training and education required to find a job and earn a stable income, they will become economically empowered and therefore have more agency over their own lives. Since this is not happening in all countries around the world, women are not economically empowered and this contributes to the overall lack of women’s empowerment we are seeing!