Celebrating International Women’s Day is to celebrate a Women’s Journey through her life, struggles, achievements, and contributions. It is to celebrate her joy, freedom, liberty, and rights. It is to celebrate Womanhood.
In recognition of the need to tackle the persistent barriers against gender equity, Chidiogo Mbanusi; Miss Earth Nigeria 2020/2021, STEM enthusiast, Environmentalist, Humanitarian, Women, and Girlchild activist takes a look at the 2023 theme of international women’s Day.
Excerpts:
This year’s theme, “DigitALL: Innovation and technology for gender equality,” highlights the role of innovative technology in promoting gender equality and meeting the health and developmental needs of women and girls.
Society had placed certain stereotypes on women as there exists a huge gender gap and discrimination against women in science, technology, innovation, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields.
This limits women in taking up opportunities in society and these stereotypes need to be broken for women to take up spaces in STEM as well as be able to contribute to their health and developmental needs of women and girls.
STEM are fields dominated by men and there is a need to encourage women and young girls to take this path in bringing development to any nation by inventing possible solutions to global challenges.
Women deserve every opportunity to lead and contribute to the growth of society. We cannot achieve this without innovation, digital technological development, research, quality education as well as enlightenment.
Today, school, work, social life, and health are all advancing to increasingly digital life; now it is time to work with girls and women to close the gender gap that exists in our social life, work-life, school life, and leadership.
We can only achieve this by giving every woman and girlchild the tools they need to survive in such a thriving and digital world where women and girl-children are being marginalized in education, leadership, society, and even in our families.
We need more women to rise, speak up, and take part in decision makings and the development of our nations as this will go a long way in changing the narrative of innovation and technology for gender equality.
Women need to be developed and equipped with skills for this increasingly digital workplace. Skills like confidence, to be able to express herself at will in matters concerning her and society, freedom to express her opinions and assert her views on issues bothering society. Women and girls require innovative and technological skills and equal opportunity in society to excel and to occupy positions in careers relating to STEM in school, the workplace, government, and society at large.
Read Also: International Women’s Day: MFOH Nigeria Seeks Digital Equity
I believe that women and girls deserve every opportunity to lend their talents, knowledge, ideas, strength, and ability to our world and should be accorded the opportunity to express themselves and excel in innovation and technological advancements.
