Oppression of Women Around the World
Oppression of Women Around the World
The story that stuck out to me was the female genital cutting; it was horrible to watch and to imagine. “3 million girls a year are cut” (Half the Sky 15:27). People like Edna are warriors; they are trying to help these problems throughout the world. They are standing up for these women who are cut open to have children; these women have 10-11 children, and each time they have a child, their risk of death goes up drastically. Enda has developed a program where midwives are stationed around areas that need them. They are there to prevent disease and death. Unfortunately, many health services are not available. There are many reasons that women are not able to survive childbirth, and the traditional thinking is that if you seek help for childbirth, you are considered weak. I don’t think that people in the United States are aware of this happening. I had heard about it, but I didn't know that more than 30 million women were affected by it. That is a heartbreaking number.
I think that the documentary needs to be seen by everyone to show the abuse and the horror that women from all over the world deal with. I enjoyed watching this documentary; the only thing I would criticize is the lack of respect shown to the people being filmed. They have a few translators, but it is not enough to fully understand these women's stories. To fully understand these stories, we need to understand the culture and language within which these women are a part. In the United States, women have access to healthcare, not all women, but many. For example, I know I have access to good healthcare when it comes to pregnancies. I don’t think we can fully understand the hardships that occur in these countries, because they are entirely foreign to us. It needs to be discussed more, and we should be educated on it further.
One of the most serious issues of gender inequality in the U.S. today is the persistent gender pay gap. “Although the gap between men’s and women’s earnings has decreased since 1970, by 2019 the gap was 81.5%, with women’s weekly earnings averaging $821 in comparison to $1,007 for men.” (Women Overview: Brandwein). Progress has been made over the past decades, but women still earn, on average, less than men for the same or comparable work. This gap is even larger for women of color, who face the compounded effects of both racial and gender discrimination. “While White women earned 78.6% of what White men earned, Black women earned only 61.8%. Asian-American women, who did best, earned 90.2%, while Latinas earned only 54.5% of what White men earned.” (Women Overview, Brandwein). The pay gap matters because it has a ripple effect on many other areas of life. “The term ‘feminization of poverty,’ introduced in the late 1970s, identified the phenomenon that poverty was increasingly a problem for women; that there was an increasing disparity in income for women and men.” (Women: Overview, Brandwein). Lower earnings limit women’s ability to build wealth, invest in education, save for retirement, or support their families. It also reflects and reinforces societal assumptions about the value of women’s work and their roles both inside and outside the home. Beyond financial effects, it signals that women’s contributions are still undervalued, which perpetuates inequality across generations.
References
Brandwein, R. (2022, February 24). Women: Overview. Encyclopedia of Social Work. Retrieved 26 Sep. 2025, from https://oxfordre-com.unk.idm.oclc.org/socialwork/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780199975839.001.0001/acrefore-9780199975839-e-630.
Half_the_sky_2. (2025). Yuja.com. https://unk.yuja.com/V/Video?v=9278244&node=39627514&a=162004541&autoplay=1
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