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Girls Just Wanna have Fundamental Rights

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In South Korea, which is where I was born, there is a larger gender discrimination issue compared to other highly developed countries. Many have treated women unfairly over hundreds of years; women were only able to compete in the Olympics from the 1900 Paris Games onwards. 

And according to SavetheChildren.org, it will take over 200 years to reach gender equality in the United States alone. 

So that future generations can inherit a society with absolute equality, the issue of gender inequality worldwide can be solved by a change in the opinions as to what certain genders can and cannot do. Even though gender equality was incorporated into a part of the International Human Rights Law by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights on 10 December, 1948, there are still many places with unequal pay for women and a large bias in the education and health sectors, as well as a general preference for boys over girls. 

If this worldwide issue is affecting many nations, then how is it impacting the most populated country in the world, China?

 “Women hold up half the sky”. This well-known phrase by Chairman Mao Zedong from the 1960s has allowed the people of China to mostly support gender equality going forward.

However, much gender inequality remains. From early times, men have been the ones to lead households and are known to be the only carriers of their ancestors’ blood. Then there was Confucius who stated that women must act following the requirements of men near them; their fathers when they are young, their husbands when they are married and their sons when they are widowed. Mao’s phrase addressed these stereotypes as to what women could and could not do. 

China now asserts full support for gender equality, but the exponential growth and economic development of the nation has also made this a challenge. For instance, the gender gap in China’s labour force widens every year; the increase in the ratio of men to women in businesses that was 9.4 percent is now 14.1 percent. 

Additionally, in the global gender earnings gap rankings, China was last year ranked 106th out of 153 countries, significantly lower than in 2006 when it was in 63rd place. The reasons are governmental and societal.

Firstly, there has been a decline in childcare support from the state, which has forced many women to take care of their children on their own while their men go out to earn money. 

And today, fewer and fewer newly-married couples are living with their parents, which has increased women’s parental responsibilities with grandparents of the children not around to help take care of them. 

While China officially supports gender equality, there is still much to do to put an end to implicit bias in employment and parenting roles. 

However, Confucius also, ironically, claimed that everybody should have equal access to education. Indeed, the equal education of both men and women in China has been on the rise; the country’s illiteracy rate decreased from 16.6 percent in 1995 to 7.5 percent in 2018 for all women 15 years old and above. Back in 1949, the illiteracy rate of all citizens in China was even at 80 percent! 

In 2018, women in master’s and doctorate programs represented 51.2 and 40.4 percent of all students in 2018, respectively, up by an average of 22 percent from 23 years ago. Due to such rising education levels, girls are receiving more attention from their families than ever before and are clearly showing that they are also able to get a good job with good earning potential, just like a son could. 

What’s in a (gender-equal) name?

In today’s China, there has been a notable change in the passing down of surnames since the end of the one-child policy in late 2015, with more and more people now preferring to give their babies their mother’s family name. As time goes on in the 21st century, last names have become less significant to families, while many parents are also deciding to give their children a combination of both their father and mother’s surnames, as reported by the South China Morning Post.

In 2018, among the 90,000 babies born in Shanghai, 91.2 percent had their father’s surname, 8.8 percent had their mother’s and 2.5 percent had both. 

So, while China still has gender bias in some sectors, it is working hard and improving equality in others.

As a female student who has been studying abroad with people from many different cultures, I believe that although not everyone may think the same nor have similar backgrounds, people should all respect each other as fellow equal human beings, without stereotypical thinking about gender nor race. 

In China, about 700 million people are women. This means there are many possibilities for how this nation can lead the trend for gender equality, through greater education, job opportunities and equal pay for women. Combined with making child gender preferences a thing of the past, China could become a place of near-absolute gender equality.

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