J OYC E
BANDA
FORMER
PRESIDENT
OF MALAWI
Western
feminism
can’t work
here ...
In Africa,
women
have been
leaders
before, and
they have
not been
leaders by
intimidating
men but by
engaging
them and
persuading
them ...
We need
to look at
our own
traditions
and do it our
own way.
89). In Malawi and other African countries that don’t have the legislative
mandates to help women rise, change is being fomented on the ground,
through female chiefs who are empowering women and girls.
But change is seldom easy. The patriarchal status quo is deeply
entrenched, especially in authoritarian states where challenging the sys-
tem, whether you’re a man or a woman, comes at a hefty cost. To date, no
country in the world has reached gender parity. Nordic states such as Ice-
land and Norway lead the way, achieving the highest ranking in the World
Economic Forum’s annual Global Gender Gap Index. The population-
weighted index measures gender disparities across four key areas: health,
education, economy, and politics. The poorer performing half of the list
includes Malawi and most of the rest of sub-Saharan Africa. But significant
variation exists within a region, and two sub-Saharan African nations also
place in the list’s top 10: Rwanda (sixth) and Namibia (10th). Rwanda’s high
ranking is thanks largely to a generation of pro-women laws that followed
the devastating genocide in 1994 (see story, page 82).
Gender inequality is not determined by, or confined to, any one place,
race, or religion. Canada, for example, is ranked 16th on the global index,
while the United States sits at number 51, dragging down the overall ranking
for North America because of stagnation on the “political empowerment”
subindex and a decrease in gender parity in Cabinet-level positions, as well
as a slide in education.
The rankings add texture to our understanding of women’s influence,
and challenges, around the world—particularly in the Middle East and
Africa, two vast geographical regions that are often flattened into homog-
enized monoliths and stripped of the nuanced differences that make
each country unique.
“There isn’t one type of woman in the Middle East,” says Lebanese actress
and director Nadine Labaki, who made Academy Awards history last year
by becoming the first female Arab filmmaker nominated for an Oscar, for
Capernaum, her wrenching Arabic-language drama about street children.
“There are many different women, but most of them, even in the most
difficult circumstances, are strong,” she says. “Women find strength to
fight in their own way, whether it’s within their families or on a bigger scale
in their work. They have so much power. When I imagine any woman from
this region, I don’t imagine her submissive and weak. Never.”
Bochra Belhaj Hamida, a Tunisian parliamentarian, human rights
lawyer, and one of the founders and former leaders of the Tunisian Asso-
ciation of Democratic Women, says it’s “colonialist” to think that an Arab
woman, for example, will accept fewer rights than a Western woman. But
her approach to attaining those rights may differ.
In Iran activists continue to boldly push for change through individual
acts of protest, in social media, and in their homes, such as defying the
requirement of the Islamic Republic’s leadership that women wear hijabs.
During the past few years, dozens of women—often in white clothing—have
publicly peeled off their head scarves in videos that have gone viral using
the hashtag #whitewednesdays. Nasrin Sotoudeh, the female human rights
lawyer who represented many of the women who were arrested, was sen-
tenced in March 2019 to 38 and a half years’ imprisonment and 148 lashes.
Yet in May 2019, after a years-long campaign by activists, the same cler-
ical leadership that punished women for removing their head scarves
began considering whether to allow Iranian women to pass their citizen-
ship on to children born to foreign fathers. It’s a right that more progressive
60 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC