“For centuries, women have banded together to resist oppressors, to try to make peace. It seems to be something we do well. So how do we get women to the table?” – that was the question posed by Alice Greenwald, Aurora Board Member, Founder and Principal of Memory Matters and Former President and CEO of the National September 11 Memorial and Museum, at the ‘Gender Justice and Women’s Empowerment’ breakout session held on May 9, 2024, at the Human Rights and Humanitarian Forum in Los Angeles, California.
Speakers of the event included Ilwad Elman, 2020 Aurora Prize Laureate and Director of Programs and Development at Elman Peace Center; Zubaida Akbar, Afghanistan Program Manager at FEMENA; Janine di Giovanni, Executive Director and CEO of The Reckoning Project; and Zubaida Bai, President and CEO of Grameen Foundation. The discussion was moderated by Alice Greenwald.
During her keynote address, Zubaida Bai, President and CEO of Grameen Foundation, talked about her experience as a gender expert and how that had affected the development of her views on the gender justice issue. “Two decades into my work, I’m still thinking about the invisibility of women. Where is the justice? Why are women still invisible? <...> Today, we are courageously standing up and saying, we are going to stop solving the problem. We are going to address the root cause of the issue,” explained Ms. Bai.
Zubaida Akbar, Afghanistan Program Manager at FEMENA, noted that, given the severe challenges faced by women of Afghanistan, it is crucial for external organizations and individuals to speak on their behalf. “It’s really key to keep the light on Afghanistan, to keep talking about the situation because the last thing that we want to see is that the Taliban’s atrocities and brutality is normalized, and it’s just something that happens and we all look away from. The other thing that’s really important is to listen to women of Afghanistan and to elevate their voices and to elevate the work of their organizations,” said Ms. Akbar.
Women’s agency often relies on men advocating for their rights, so working with them can help address the issue of gender equality more effectively, stated Ilwad Elman, 2020 Aurora Prize Laureate and Director of Programs and Development at Elman Peace Center. “We provide safe houses, and healthcare, and so forth, but we need to address social norms. And we are seeing some progress in that right now, from 2010, when we couldn’t even speak about sexual violence, to where we are today, where we have a Sexual Offenses Bill, where we have a growing legal framework, an entry point for accountability, where we have a women’s movement that is no longer being silenced,” added Ms. Elman.
Men not thinking of women as equals is a huge part of the problem, agreed Janine di Giovanni, Executive Director and CEO of The Reckoning Project, who recalled dealing with mansplaining as a young war reporter. “We didn’t have that word then, but it was basically guys telling me what to do. I would just sneak away from them and do something, and I was so much better than them. I would always get people to talk to me because I would just sit on the floor and drink tea with them and smoke cigarettes, and they would talk to me. And everyone always said, “Oh, women, you know, they use their feminine wiles.” But I didn’t. All I did was use my feminine intuition and my feminine ability to listen,” said Ms. di Giovanni.
Alice Greenwald, Aurora Board Member, Founder and Principal of Memory Matters and Former President and CEO of the National September 11 Memorial and Museum, reminded the audience that women and grassroots women’s organizations have been making extraordinary peacebuilding efforts for centuries. “You can go back to the 5th century B .C. in Aristophanes ‘Lysistrata,’ where women stopped war. It’s a comedy, but it makes the point. And you had Mothers of Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires, [where] to this day, grandmothers are walking for the disappeared. You have, more recently, two organizations, Women Wage Peace and Women of the Sun, that I believe are being promoted – I don’t know if they’ll get it – for the Nobel Prize together,” pointed out Ms. Greenwald.