We are all about celebrating women and our environment around these parts! Our founder, lead scientist and studio manager in Cambodia are women and we couldn’t be more grateful. Research has shown just knowing about women in these positions in your community can increase girls participation in STEM (check out #skwoodlewomen for some inspiring women) and we have lots of work to do when it comes to funding for womxn founders.
In daily environment work women take on a huge number of roles whether through research, conservation, restoration, growing or harvesting. Research also shows women recycle more. Purely from an overall policy perspective, studies outline the more gender equality in a country (and the more women in influential government positions), the better the outcomes for the environment and the more land is protected.
The theme of this year’s IWD is #EachforEqual. An equal world is an enabled world. To do this we need to raise awareness when you see bias, take action, and celebrate women’s achievements (starting a business, creating an action campaign, running a not-for-profit, completing a thesis, getting a promotion, securing funding, donating a significant portion of your salary, volunteering every week, pulling together a community, starting a community garden, fostering children and hundreds of other things should be celebrated just as much as the parties and importance we still place on getting married or having a biological baby). Celebrate more!
One big thing we’d like to advocate is involving women in proposal, policy and plan formulations and ensuring women are in leadership roles. Likewise too when it comes to the law. Too often women are excluded from this process at great disadvantage and have no ongoing decision-making capabilities, governance or trajectory forward. There are also a lot of negative consequences to implemented projects that don’t deeply involve us all in the process. Women are not only just capable of this, we excel at it.
There are a lot of incredible women working on our environment here – tag them in (your friends or your inspiration), we’d love to celebrate them.
Happy #IWD2020 friends!
