Rethinking Female Empowerment in Education

At the education company I’m interning at, I attended a Women’s Day People’s Talk. Dozens of educators, HR, marketing, and sales employees gathered in front of the screen, nodding and sharing about their journey working at one of “Forbes World’s Top Companies for Women”. 

That one and a half hour was interesting, and necessary… for a corporate setting. Yet, as I listened to the women (and men) finish off each other’s sentences about how more than half of the company’s senior management are women and how they’re not ashamed of admitting they have children, I couldn’t help but notice the very limited national and income backgrounds these people come from. 

Obviously, these statistics should be greatly celebrated. Granted, most companies in the world don’t even bother trying to pursue them. Still, this makes me wonder, behind the glamor of throwing these slogans around fancy suits, what can female empowerment in education also mean?

I’ve been in English2Success* for over a year now, first with tutoring, and now as one of the Directors. 99% of the people I’ve worked with are students, and 90% of them are girls. That’s a pretty intriguing number, given that the organization wasn’t built to be exclusively for females, and we never filtered out students based on anything other than their income level. It just so happens that most students seeking/in need of English education, at least from us, are girls. 

This tells us two things. 

First, in the wake of our current alarming political climate, girls are more vulnerable to having education opportunities stripped away. I believe this requires no further explanations, as many of you have likely heard from your own students—especially for those of you tutoring Afghan students (who make up over 80% of our student population).  

Second, girls are ambitious and perfectly capable of making our own decisions. Unlike other large government or private schools, we’re not an accredited institution (yet), only a student-led platform offering extremely flexible tutoring services. Yet, despite the absence of a well-funded outreach team flying to every corner of the world recruiting prospective students, we’ve already received hundreds of applications — mostly from girls, some of them as young as 8. They all have different reasons for applying, and every conversation I’ve had with them has always been immensely inspiring. Some are preparing to take the IELTS/TOEFL test, some are hoping to connect and learn with foreigners, some are seizing every opportunity they can find to hopefully one day be able to provide for their family, and take them out of Afghanistan. Ultimately, these girls are the ones actively looking for opportunities, not only for themselves, but to improve the lives of everyone they love. Their enthusiasm, dedication, and kindness often put me to shame or push me to work harder (it’s a constantly fluctuating and uneven spectrum that I’m still trying to figure out). 

But what does this really mean?

We’ve stepped into the 21st century, in which female empowerment has been raised as one of the top 17 goals to reach for the global community. This is incredible. The acknowledgement alone signals progression and a start for greater action. However, once we implement this as a quantitative metric, we have formed a loophole where girls are once again vulnerable to being exploited by organizations to acquire funds, build brand image, or do whatever they come up with. There have also been many reports of Western development professionals using “empowerment” as a buzzword and claiming to have “empowered” non-Western women through handing out chickens and sewing machines. 

This reveals a blatant irony and ignorance of what girls truly need: A safe environment, and genuine understanding and support for our dreams and aspirations. The moment we fail to realize or remember this, and resort to chasing numbers for LinkedIn, we’re at risk of objectifying girls for our own personal motives, again. 

This brings us back to the topic of education. Education is a means to unlock opportunities in life, and create a better future for ourselves and people we care about. Essentially, it’s a tool for empowerment, which is why it’s always one of the first and most significant things underprivileged communities seek for. However, to truly empower, it’s crucial to recognize that the student, instead of the educator, should be treated as the active party, not the passive one, and that it is the students’ needs that should be prioritized. 

Girls are beautiful, intelligent, and very talented. We’re all full of wonderful ideas and willingness to bring them to life. What we need is people telling us that they believe in and support us, and the correct resources and paths to thrive independently. Numbers are important. I’m in no way discrediting all the hard work thousands of organizations, big or small, have been putting into creating the changes that we’ve seen today. I’m simply encouraging everyone to take some time to really get to know the girls in your life, be it your current English2Success* students, your co-years, or anyone else. 

We spend so much time calculating and reading through sets of data to fulfill KPIs, yet at the end of the day, we’re all human beings, and everyone—every girl—has a story to tell, a dream to reach. And perhaps, sometimes, it’s better to help some people a lot than to help a lot of people a little.

*English2Success is a student-led voluntary teaching initiative aiming to provide quality online English education for underprivileged teens worldwide. More information can be found on our website linked here, our LinkedIn page linked here, and our Instagram page linked here.

This article is part of English2Success's March newsletter, which can be read here.