Caryn McTighe Musil

When this year’s Nobel Peace Prize recipients were announced, women around the world celebrated. But the celebrations should not be limited to women alone. Three women—Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, president of Liberia; Leymah Gbowee, Liberian social worker and peace activist; and Tawakkal Karman, journalist and democracy activist in Yemen—shared this year’s honors. In singling them out, the Nobel selection committee explained, “We cannot achieve democracy and lasting peace in the world unless women obtain the same opportunities as men to influence developments at all levels of society” (2011). In other words, when women are doing well, the whole world is doing well.

Ricardo Hausmann, Laura D. Tyson, and Saadia Zahidi, authors of the recently released Global Gender Gap Report 2011, agree. Their research suggests a correlation between three national measures—overall economic competitiveness, income, and development—and the extent of the gender gap in access to resources and opportunities. When the gender gap decreases, countries flourish along the three measures (32). By contrast, countries with greater gender gaps suffer negative consequences along the three measures. That information alone should be incentive for every nation to invest in reducing the gender gap—and for every college and university to help its students attain the knowledge, skills, and abilities necessary to make these investments.

Impressive Achievements

The good news is that this year’s Global Gender Gap Report indicates that the world is gradually closing the gap in at least two areas. Using data on 135 countries that comprise 90 percent of the world’s population, the report indicates that  96 percent of the gap in access to health resources and opportunities has been closed, along with 93 percent of the gap in education (7). In the economic arena, however, the news is not so cheery: only 59 percent of the gap has closed (17). The picture is bleakest of all in the area of political opportunity, where the gender gap hovers at a disturbingly low 19 percent (17).

These figures make the Nobel Prize winners’ achievements all the more impressive. A Harvard-trained World Bank economist and the former Liberian minister of finance, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, 72, is the first democratically elected female president in any country on the African continent. (She is now in a tight race to win re-election.) Her election as president came only after Leymah Gbowee, 39, and her Women of Liberia Mass Action for Peace had organized Christian and Muslim women across religious lines to help end the brutal and brutalizing fourteen-year Liberian civil war.

The riveting documentary Pray the Devil Back to Hell recounts the courage it took for women with little political presence to dare to assert their voices, persevering nonviolently year after year in the face of continued violence and little progress. In 2003, Gbowee’s stalwart group of women demonstrated at the presidential palace in Ghana where peace talks were stalled, eventually blocking the doors to prevent the all-male negotiators from leaving until they had created a peace agreement. Sirleaf was elected president two years later and took office in 2006.

Tawakkal Karman, 32, the youngest of the three recipients, cofounded Women Journalists Without Chains in 2005 and has since continued to exercise political expression in Yemen, a country where few women are allowed to voice any. In the Global Gender Gap Report, Yemen ranked 131 out of 135 countries in terms of equal political opportunities. Months before the Arab spring spread across the Middle East, Karman, face unveiled, led her first march with a few dozen women and called for the resignation of president Ali Abdullah Saleh. Eventually thousands joined her. Despite being arrested and jailed for her political actions, she has continued to protest weekly in Yemen’s capital, Sanaa. On the mantel in her home, she displays pictures of four people to whom she looks for inspiration as well as nonviolent political strategies: Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, and Hillary Clinton.

Implications for Higher Education

All three Nobel Prize winners are working women and mothers. Their award illustrates four important points that have implications for how colleges and universities approach global issues through education, research, and action.

First, global gender equality should not be seen as just a women’s issue. It is everyone’s issue, because the consequences of gender inequality affect the entire society. Accordingly, courses that address global equality should appear throughout the curriculum and reach a wide range of student audiences. Second, women uniting to support one another in common causes can revolutionize the world. Each of the three Nobel Prize winners is quick to say she derives her power from larger networks of women spanning time and geography. Curricula should investigate not merely heroic individuals, but also the ways their lives intertwine with larger historical, cultural, economic, and social movements. Third, external bodies can make a difference: Nobel Prize Committees, UN Millennial Goals, filmmakers and media, higher education, and political support from high-ranking women politicians can all exert pressures that lead to positive change. This suggests the value of academic inquiry into the sources of existing powerful entities that make social change possible or sustain it. Fourth, research that documents the status of women, their access to opportunities, and the consequences of gender gaps in that access is critical to laying the groundwork for further progress. More is needed.

While the three women Nobel Prize recipients deserve accolades, they would be among the first to insist that there is still much to be done. The majority of the world’s population is poor, and the majority of the poor are women. Similarly, a billion of the world’s people are illiterate, and in six of eight world regions, two-thirds of these are women (Stromquist 2011). Women and children are the less visible victims of war, and violence against women is all too common, whether through sex trafficking or domestic violence. Economic parity does not yet exist across countries or within them.

These disparities may occur in countries outside of the United States, but US colleges and universities are nonetheless obligated to educate students who can help address them. As Leymah Gbowee recently said, “Women’s issues don’t have a nationality” (Church 2011). It is thus imperative that higher education work across borders to remedy deep and lasting disparities—not only for the sake of women, but for that of all society. By doing so, US higher education can help this year’s Nobel Prize winners attain the real prize: global gender equality.

Reference

Church, Emily Musil. 2011. “A Ms. Conversation with Nobel Peace Prize Winner Leymah Gbowee.” October 7. http://msmagazine.com/blog/blog/2011/10/07/a-ms-conversation-with-nobel-peace-prize-winner-leymah-gbowee/.

Hausmann, Ricardo, Laura D. Tyson, and Saadia Zahidi. 2011. The Global Gender Gap Report 2011. http://reports.weforum.org/global-gender-gap-2011.

Norwegian Nobel Committee. 2011. "The Nobel Peace Prize 2011—Press Release," November 7. Nobelprize.org. http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/2011/press.html.

Stromquist, Nelly. 2011. “Women and Education in the Early Twenty-First Century: A Global Perspective.” On Campus with Women 40 (2).