I Am a Girl from Africa Read online

  In a moment of crisis, the wise build bridges.

  —Nigerian proverb

  14

  I scan the small, cozy room painted a crisp white color and notice the plush, patterned burgundy rugs covering the wooden tiles. Newspapers, neatly stacked on a cherrywood rectangular table in the center of the room, are written in a language unfamiliar to me. Although sparsely furnished, the space feels intimate and regal at the same time. I fix my eyes on the closed brown door at the opposite end of the room and feel a surge of adrenaline course through me.

  It is 2015, and last night, my boss Phumzile and I arrived in Reykjavík, Iceland, on a very important mission. Even at night, the capital looked to me like a child’s model of a city: houses with bright doors and shuttered windows spaced perfectly apart; bells chiming from church belfries; cobblestone streets teeming with life even at the late hour, filled with people fashionably dressed in warm scarves tied just so under their jacket collars.

  Phumzile, sitting next to me, looks calm and collected. I try to match her patience as we wait for the brown door to open and for the two of us to be called into the prime minister’s office. Noticing my discomfort, she flashes me a confident smile, and I wonder: Is she as nervous as I am? There is so much at stake in this meeting. We are so close to the goals we’ve been working day and night to achieve, and the thought of losing it all now makes my stomach turn. I try to distract myself with thoughts about how hard we have worked and how far we have come.

  * * *

  At the first of the year, we engaged the world’s most powerful men as HeForShe “Champions” to help create real and transformative change toward gender equality. This quest has proven to be incredibly difficult—negotiating with presidents and prime ministers, urging CEOs to rise to the challenge, encouraging university presidents to do their part—while encountering intense scrutiny from the media about the validity of the Champions’ commitments to gender equality.

  We also faced a major setback when several countries’ presidents and prime ministers pushed back on reporting against their progress, despite having agreed to transparently track it as a prerequisite for joining the initiative. We persevered, visiting and lobbying each committed head of state and their government’s ambassadors, offering reminders such as: “Your Excellency, as member states of the United Nations, you are the UN, and we can’t ask others to abide by the highest level of transparency if we are unwilling to lead by example.” I cited other leaders in their cohort—the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies and presidents of leading universities—who were publicly reporting progress against their gender equality commitments. Finally, they agreed, and they are already ushering in change at a pace and magnitude I had only dreamt about.

  In Japan, over a million women are rejoining the workforce as part of the prime minister’s gender commitment, which we are hopeful will change the day-to-day realities and future prospects of young women like Akiko, whose husband left her when she decided to pursue a career in medicine.

  PricewaterhouseCoopers, a global professional services firm with 276,000 employees, is reaching parity in their global leadership team as part of their gender pledge, moving from having only 18 percent of their leadership positions held by women to 47 percent equal female representation, finally achieving a goal that had remained elusive for more than sixteen years.

  So many stories tug at my heart and remind me of the stakes of this work, as well as the power of individuals to create change when given the opportunity. I met Lupita, born in Indonesia and the daughter of a military officer, when she bravely shared her story during one of our HeForShe events in New York City. In her midtwenties, she wore a flowy, bright pink top that precisely matched the color of her lipstick. She had a striking presence, even more so when she spoke: “My father always gave equal opportunities to my brother and me. He pushed and supported me to be brave and confident as a young woman. He is my role model; he is my first HeForShe.” Then, at the age of ten, while walking from home to school, Lupita was sexually assaulted by a group of young men.

  “Because of my father, I grew up believing that I could achieve everything, but when the assault happened, I learned that the outside world can be hard for women,” she said. “I was terrified by the notion that men can be so malicious to girls and that they can treat us as undignified objects. The incident traumatized me, but it also gave me the courage to speak up and stand up against sexual violence.” Resolve burned in her eyes.

  After Lupita finished college, she began working for a leading French multinational company, Danone, in their Indonesia office. When she learned about the HeForShe movement, she immediately took action, creating an internal HeForShe program with four other female colleagues at her workplace, launching special empowerment initiatives for female employees—including cross-gender mentoring and leadership training with male coworkers who volunteered to participate. In the span of a single year, her brainchild had reached Danone’s offices in Russia, the Netherlands, Singapore, China, and most importantly, the corporate headquarters in France. While this was unfolding, neither I nor my colleagues knew anything about Lupita’s efforts or the success of the program she had started, until one day we received a surprising phone call from Danone’s CEO—volunteering to become a HeForShe Champion in the pilot initiative.

  Because of Lupita’s tenacious advocacy, Danone made an unprecedented gender commitment, becoming one of the first companies in the world to roll out a global, gender-neutral paid parental leave policy for all of its 120,000 employees. The policy provides mothers, fathers, and adoptive parents eighteen weeks of paid parental leave, no matter what country or territory they work in, including in the United States, which currently has no such law for new parents.

  Just like that, a young woman in Indonesia, together with her four female colleagues, changed the lives of their fellow coworkers, positively impacting 120,000 lives.

  “I have learned that we are never too young to create change, and that no action is ever too small,” Lupita explained. “I believe that with passion and energy, we all can drive small things into big things. But even then, I never could have imagined that young Indonesian women could make as big an impact in a global corporation this fast,” she said, choking up with pride.

  Lupita was absolutely right. I witnessed the same level of passion myself when I spent months on a bus traveling across Europe and North America, determined to bring the message of gender equality directly to students at colleges and universities. Our goal was to help break the generational cycle of inequality, as research has shown that these formative years inform if and how much you care about issues of social inequality.

  Engaging with students was invigorating, and I was routinely surprised by their input and the stories I heard. When I asked a young male student at Cambridge University in the UK what gender equality meant to him, his response was “Being able to drink my sparkling apple juice without judgment.” His answer was quite unexpected, to say the very least, and so when I probed, he elaborated: “I was brought up in a very conservative family. No one in my family drinks alcohol and neither do I. But then last year I started university, and noticed that all my mates were always hanging out at the pub. One day I joined them and when one of my mates asked what I wanted to drink and I said a sparkling apple juice, everyone laughed and said ‘Man up!’ so I succumbed to peer pressure and drank beer. It was my first time drinking alcohol.” He paused and his voice grew quiet; he would not meet my gaze. “I was so drunk when I left the pub that night that I ended up sexually harassing a fellow female student, a friend of mine. I still feel so ashamed for my behavior. Since that day I have vowed never to touch alcohol again and neither do I hang out with those mates.” He hung his head in shame. It was quite a lot to take in. I remember thinking that if something as basic as a drink can be gendered and used to demean someone, then we still have a long way to go.

  At one of the leading universities in the US, a female student confided in me about the unwelc
ome advances of her male professor. “I don’t know what to do. I am afraid that if I turn down his advances, he will fail me, and I really can’t afford for that to happen. My mom works four jobs so I can afford to be here.” She looked and sounded utterly defeated.

  These were some of the real issues and concerns of the students we encountered. In hallways and in campus student centers or common areas, we sat on dusty floors and in the damp grass, holding heated debates that challenged students’ notions of gender biases and gender norms. We discussed how gender equality means liberation for all genders.

  “Our gender should not impede our ability to be ambitious and career-driven and committed to family life,” Valerie, a student at the Paris Institute of Political Studies, or Sciences Po, stated. We talked about the fact that there are fewer women in Engineering classes, while men remain under-represented in the Social Sciences; we lamented the fact that domestic and intimate partner violence impacts one in three women globally, but also how the UK has documented that one in eight men are also victims of domestic violence in Britain. We talked about how words like “bossy,” “bitchy,” and “emotional” are used to undermine women and girls, while men and boys are ridiculed for showing any emotion. “We don’t want to be held back by outdated notions of masculinity. Our gender should not restrict us from showing our emotions. We can be strong and vulnerable and that’s okay. It just makes us more human,” added Darrel, a student from Stony Brook University on Long Island, in New York. He talked about his struggle to align his thoughts and actions with society’s definition of what it means to be a man, including expectations that he should be a breadwinner and never show emotion. He was taught to believe that seeking any kind of mental health support—even when he needed it—would render him “weak,” which made him less of a man.

  Many of our dialogues dove into the intersectionality of gender, the way that multiple aspects of discrimination—involving gender, race, sexuality, class, disability, and more—converge in people’s lived experiences. At the University of Leicester in the UK, a student named Amy had her own frustrations. “People need to stop talking about gender equality as if it is binary, because it is not, it is a spectrum,” she said. As difficult as some of those discussions were, I always left feeling hopeful and inspired, and full of an even greater conviction that the only real way to create lasting change is for all genders to work together.

  * * *

  “How long?” Phumzile asks, jolting me out of my thoughts. I check my watch and say, “Ten more minutes,” then refocus on the goals of our meeting with the prime minister. Although I have been working closely with the prime minister’s office and the Icelandic ambassador to the United Nations in New York City on their gender commitment, this is my first time in Iceland.

  Long before coming here, I learned to appreciate the country’s history in the fight for women’s rights through my friend Halla, a leading women’s rights activist and former presidential candidate in Iceland. “I want to tell you when I realized that women matter to the economy and to society,” she told me. “I was seven, and it happened to be my mother’s birthday, October 24, 1975. On that historic day, women in Iceland went on strike and took the day entirely off work. They refused to work, cook, or care for children in order to create a new way to see women in Iceland; namely, as indispensable. On that day, nothing worked in Iceland; everything ground to a halt. The women marched into the city center and demanded that women’s issues be added to all national policy agendas moving forward. Some say that this marked the genesis of a global movement. For me, it was the start of a long journey, and I decided to make that day matter,” Halla explained, and the joy of this story made her brown eyes shine.

  She went on to tell me how the efforts of the Icelandic women paid off. Five years after the strike, in 1980, Iceland elected its first female president, Vigdís Finnbogadóttir, who became the world’s first democratically elected female president. This was a giant step for gender equality on a global scale, and this milestone event propelled Iceland to become the most gender-equal country in the world according to the World Economic Forum Gender Index. However, despite this unprecedented progress, women in Iceland were unable to attain one of the core rights they had been fighting for: legislation that would legally enforce equal pay for equal work.

  Knowing Halla’s story and this history, when the prime minister of Iceland expressed an interest in becoming a HeForShe Champion, I leapt at the opportunity to advocate for a policy that would deliver equal pay for Icelandic women. This was not an easy ask, considering that, at the time, no other country had come close to making such a commitment. It was one thing to ask a company to commit to equal pay for their workforce, as we had done with the CEOs of two French companies, AccorHotels and Schneider Electric—who both pledged to eliminate unequal pay for their one hundred thousand plus global employees—but it was an entirely different story to have such a law adopted and enforced at the national level for an entire country.

  In my travels around the world, I’ve met hundreds of women who must work several jobs just to make ends meet, and I have seen the impact of pay inequity on many more. Women’s work continues to be undervalued and underpaid; globally, women are still paid 23 percent less than men for doing exactly the same work. In the US, mothers in two out of every five households with children are either the sole or primary source of income for the family, meaning that nearly half of American families are robbed of over 20 percent of their annual income. This unfair reality is exacerbated by racial inequality, which has created an unjust hierarchy that sees African-American women making less than white women, and leaves Hispanic women to bear the biggest brunt of the pay gap, earning the very least among their counterparts. In my own home continent of Africa, the World Bank reports that nearly one in four households are now headed by a woman. Given that this is the reality for much of the world, it is difficult to understand why equal pay is still seen as a women’s issue, when it is more accurately an issue of fairness that impacts the lives of many people in obvious, measurable ways.

  With these factors in mind, Phumzile and I stuck to our conviction that Iceland was in the unique position to lead the world on this issue, knowing that the gender pay gap needed to be closed, forever and for good. Such a move would be historic and life-changing for the entire population of Iceland, establishing a beacon of hope and progress for women in the rest of the world.

  * * *

  When the door to the president’s office finally opens, we are ushered into a long, narrow meeting room decorated with an elegant blond wood table and cabinetry, understated Scandinavian glam. Phumzile, a colleague from the UN Women’s regional office, and I sit across the table from the prime minister and his three advisors, who look serious but receptive. I hope they understand how high the stakes of this conversation truly are.

  A few months ago, the Icelandic government made a HeForShe commitment to close the gender pay gap in the country by mandating equal pay for equal work for all companies doing business in Iceland. This groundbreaking commitment means that every business in Iceland must ensure pay equality for their workers, and any company that has not implemented this standard by 2022 will be asked to cease doing business. To achieve this hugely ambitious goal, the government—working alongside Icelandic women’s rights groups, UN Women, and other key stakeholders—has developed an auditing tool that will detect discrepancies in equal pay for any company in Iceland that employs more than twenty-five people. Once a company achieves equal pay for equal work, they will receive an equal pay accreditation from the government. However, due to the enormity of the undertaking, the tool has yet to be implemented, and we worry that progress has stalled, potentially jeopardizing the fulfillment of the pledge. This is why Phumzile and I have come to such a high-level meeting, and with such high expectations.

  As soon as we are done exchanging formal greetings, Phumzile gets straight to the point. “Your Excellency, we need your extra efforts to push for the equal
pay legislation. While our teams have made great strides, we need your support in expediting auditing so we can begin to make progress,” she says.

  The prime minister articulates the challenges in building internal consensus on the best approach to roll out the auditing tool, but he assures us that his office will hold a meeting with all relevant stakeholders to fast-track this important step of the tool’s implementation. His commitment to keeping the process moving is a huge win, and we leave his office feeling elated and relieved.

  * * *

  As we depart Reykjavík, making our way to the airport through rolling hills carpeted in green moss and flora, I finally relax, roll down the car window, and fill my lungs with the crisp, clean air. I have never seen such terrain, which reminds me of something out of a science fiction movie. The land is treeless and barren, but beautiful in its own unique—almost lunar—way. As I take in this otherworldly landscape, reveling in this important step toward reaching our goals, my mind drifts to a student I recently met named Anya, who is studying Astrophysics with the dream of becoming an astronaut.

  “Receiving the HeForShe scholarship was an absolute thrill,” Anya told me at one of Canada’s leading Engineering schools, the University of Waterloo, which launched the scholarships as part of their commitment to facilitate the admission of young women into Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) classes, with the ultimate goal of eliminating the gender gap in this field. “It has of course been a financial help, but it was much more than that,” Anya explained with excitement. “It gave me the confidence to run for vice president of the Physics club twice, and in that position I was able to make real change. I made sure that each newly elected Physics team is comprised of 50 percent women. A few of those women told me that they never would have had the courage to run had other women not run alongside them. It has completely broadened my own thinking about what I can do, and how I can be more involved in promoting gender equality in STEM.” Her words fill me with joy; just like the women in Iceland, Anya has been empowered to make the most of her opportunity, while also creating an opportunity for others. Now women in Iceland will hopefully achieve equal pay for equal work, due in part to the tireless efforts of their fellow Icelandic women who decades earlier stood up for equality during the 1975 strike.