Celebrating Women Changemakers
So, this post is about International Women’s Week celebrations and I know I am quite late in sharing this! 🙂
But I thought of writing about this for quite some time now. I would also like to thank Annapurna Finance for inviting me to ‘WOHarmony 2020’ as a panelist and asking me to discuss the roles and challenges of women in the digital world. It was through this event that I got to be a part of the International Women’s Week celebrations and share my experiences of what we were doing as well. ThinkZone currently is using accessible technology to enable women from rural India to become education micro-entrepreneurs and community change agents.
It was amazing to know about women changemakers who have decided to pursue their passion despite facing difficulties and challenges. After listening to their journeys during the event, I realized that my adversities as a social entrepreneur as well are nothing as compared to them.
During the event, I had also shared my experiences with ThinkZone. A lot of what I spoke that day about ThinkZone and our work was also inspired by the incredible stories and talks of these women who were there during the event. It felt a little good that my ideas about empowerment and breaking stereotypes which we do at ThinkZone was aligned with their idea.
We have actually never thought of ourselves as being the torchbearer of women’s empowerment. But we do have broken the stereotypes of the job roles that women can’t do. That I guess is the first step for equality. ThinkZone has never segregated work that ‘this is the role of a man and this is of a woman’. Another stereotype that ThinkZone has tried to break is ‘after marriage, the woman can’t give time to her career’, especially in rural India.
ThinkZone is taking small steps in creating opportunities for women to overcome economic and social challenges. Will everything change overnight — I don’t think so. But yeah let’s all give it a try! 🙂
Finally, on a personal level, the journey with ThinkZone has made me unlearn about true ‘women empowerment’. I have realized that many of the things which we as men do inadvertently may seem normal but are only adding to the challenges that women face every day in their personal and professional lives. I am no-one to speak about gender issues but as a man, we should be humble enough to accept and understand our actions and try working on rectifying this.
70% of the ThinkZone team members are women and working with them every day is making me unlearn my entire thought process, which was built on my early life experiences and social dynamics. It takes immense courage for women to break barriers, let’s celebrate this!
