“Too many women are still treated at best as second-class citizens, at worst as some kind of subhuman species,” she said to a packed house at New York City’s Lincoln Center. “I’ve always believed that we are not victims. We are agents of change, we are drivers of progress, we are makers of peace.”
The problems facing women are wide-sweeping: The are places like the Eastern Congo and Syria, where women are raped and deprived, their suffering viewed as merely a war tactic. In Pakistan, two-thirds of the children who don’t attend school are female. In growing countries like India and China, women are punished—sometimes socially and sometimes physically—for trying to take an active role in the economy.
Clinton pointed to statistics indicating that when women’s conditions improve, society’s condition as a whole improves. In Latin America, for example, where the number of women in the workforce has grown dramatically, extreme poverty has decreased 30 percent, according to estimates from the World Bank. The organization also projects that fast-growing Asian economies could boost their per capita incomes by as much as 14 percent by 2020 if they brought more women into the workforce.
“But as strong a case as we’ve made, too many otherwise thoughtful people continue to see the fortunes of women and girls as somehow separate from society at large,” she says. “They nod, they smile, and then they relegate these issues once again to the sidelines. I’ve seen it over and over again. I’ve been kidded about it, I’ve been ribbed, I’ve been challenged in boardrooms and offices across the world. But fighting to give women and girls a fighting chance isn’t a ‘nice’ thing to do. It isn’t some luxury that we get to when we have time on our hands to spend doing that. This is a core imperative for every human being and every society.”
Women’s rights aren’t just a problem abroad, either. For International Women’s Day on March 7, The Economist created a Glass-ceiling index based on factors like the difference between male and female median earnings and the percentage of senior management roles occupied by women. The U.S. wasn’t even in the top 10—it came in at No. 12. Recent studies have also shown that American women tend to lead shorter lives than women in any other major industrialized country.
“Let’s keep fighting for opportunities and dignity,” said Clinton. “Let’s keep fighting for freedom and equality. Let’s keep fighting for full participation, and let’s keep telling the world over and over again that, yes, women’s rights are human rights and human rights are women’s rights—once and for all.”
All fired up to help the cause? Check out how you can get involved with the Women in the World Foundation.
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