It’s 2019 and We Still Don’t Have Gender Equality. These 8 Groups Are Fighting to Change That

Our world is led by men, whether it’s within the government, environmental sector, STEM fields or as the head of the household. NationSwell rounded up eight groups fighting for women’s equality. 
 
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She Should Run

It’s 2019, yet only a third of elected officials at the local, state and federal level are women.  Twenty-two states have never had a woman for governor. The nonprofit She Should Run was founded in 2011 by Erin Loos Cutraro after she noticed a lack of support for women interested in running for government roles. To date, the group has empowered tens of thousands of women to consider running for office, and it has the ambitious goal of raising that number to 250,000 by 2030. The organization hosts an incubator program, which is an online set of courses and mentors. It also has an astonishingly high success rate: Eighty percent of women reported feeling more confident about their path to run for office after completing the training.

UN Women works with governments around the world to fight for equality.

UN Women

Many organizations have a variety of ways of tackling gender inequity. However, UN Women takes a more focused approach by working directly with governments to tackle the issue. The United Nations formed UN Women in 2010 after leaders realized there wasn’t a centralized way to tackle gender equality and women’s empowerment. The group works with government officials worldwide to create laws and legislation that support equal rights for women and girls.
 
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PERIOD

In many countries, the conversation around women’s health still isn’t happening … period. Enter PERIOD. The Menstrual Movement, a nonprofit working to provide education and menstrual supplies to women in the U.S. while breaking down taboos that still exist around monthly cycles. The founder, Nadya Okamoto, drew from her own experience as a homeless teen to start the company after finding there was an unmet need for feminine hygiene products in the homeless community. Though its primary focus is low-income women, her group supplies menstrual products to all women who need them, regardless of economic status. 

Girls who Code provides girls the chance to build a community in the field of computer science.

Girls Who Code

In the battle to close the technology gender gap, Girls Who Code is one of its leaders. Through after-school programs and summer training camps, the nonprofit empowers middle, high school and college girls to pursue degrees in computer science. Since its founding in 2012, Girls Who Code has taught basic coding to 185,000 budding computer scientists. And its impact is making a difference. The enrollment rate for Girls Who Code alumnae who choose to major in a computer-related field is 15 times the national average. 
 
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Women’s Environment and Development Organization

The world is entering a climate crisis, and women are going to be some of the populations hardest hit — particularly rural and indigenous women. The Women’s Environment and Development Organization exists to empower women in the fight against climate change through a variety of training sessions and workshops. While specific topics range from fighting climate change to achieving sustainable development, the organization also advocates for gender equality in climate change policies and planning. 
 
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Girls Not Brides

Every year, over 8 million girls marry before they turn 18, robbing many of the opportunity to choose their own path to womanhood while perpetuating a system where women are inferior to men. Girls Not Brides is a worldwide partnership of over 1,200 organizations working to end this harmful tradition. “It’s happening everywhere,” Lakshmi Sundaram, the global coordinator of Girls Not Brides, told Voices of America. “It may look a bit different in different places, but it is a universal issue.” Using data and personal accounts of girls who have experienced it, the organization works with government and communities in the Middle East, Latin America, Asia and Europe to ensure gender equality gets the attention it deserves.

International Planned Parenthood Federation is a global organization advancing sexual and reproductive health.

International Planned Parenthood Federation

International Planned Parenthood Federation has volunteers and workers in over 145 countries helping to ensure that everyone is free to make their own decisions about sexual and reproductive healthcare. While they target marginalized populations and locations around the world, 84 percent of services were specifically aimed at helping women and girls. In 2018, the federation delivered 223.2 million sexual and health services in support of reproductive rights.
 
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National Organization for Women 

Started by a grassroots group of feminists in 1966, the National Organization for Women (NOW) has hundreds of affiliate offices in all 50 states and is comprised of over 500,000 members. The group works with policymakers via conferences and seminars to ensure women receive equal treatment in every aspect of their lives. Reproductive rights and family law are priorities, as well as civil rights and voter empowerment.
This list provides only a glimpse of the hard work happening around the world to level the playing field for women and girls. Click on any of the organizations above and find out how you can get involved.
More: Shark Week Has a Gender Problem. These Women Scientists Are Trying to Fix That
Correction: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that 10 groups were included. This list features eight organizations. NationSwell apologizes for the errors.

Women Are Using Their Personal Stories to Fight Abortion Stigma — and It’s Working

Angie Marie Luna never thought she’d talk about the abortions she had at ages 18 and 19. Raised in a religious, Mexican-American Catholic household in Chicago, Luna was always told that abortion was a sin — by her parents, her sibling, her uncle and the abusive boyfriend who, she says, refused to wear a condom as a means of controlling her behavior. “He told me later that he intentionally tried to get me pregnant so I would drop out of college.”
Luna stayed in school, and today, at 25, she’s part of a rising chorus of voices embracing one of humankind’s oldest art forms — storytelling — as a tool to strip away the stigma and shame that surrounds abortion. Luna works as an ambassador for Youth Testify, an offshoot of the storytelling projects We Testify and the 1 in 3 Campaign. The program trains young people who have had abortions on how to effectively share their stories with lawmakers, the media and their own peers. The goal is to humanize a procedure that is often demonized by encouraging empathy over judgment; by raising awareness around issues of reproductive access; and ultimately, by impacting policy.
Using narratives to break taboos around abortion isn’t new, of course. In the early 2000s, the now-defunct ImNotSorry.net launched as a forum for people to share their experiences with abortion. The sheer volume, and variety, of similar efforts that have sprung up in the nearly two decades since — from hashtags and podcasts to comics, plays and photography exhibits — has made it tough to get an accurate count of just how many there are (though the nonprofit Abortion Conversation Projects keeps a semi-up-to-date list).
Sharing can be therapeutic, and no doubt that finding a community of nonjudgmental peers can foster camaraderie among those who feel they can’t disclose their own abortion to their friends and family. But can narratives around abortion actually change people’s minds? Do they, in fact, reduce stigma?
“When you see or hear or read the narrative around people’s abortion experiences, it humanizes that experience and you are no longer able to consider the person getting the abortion as an ‘other’ or as someone who isn’t like you,” says Gretchen Ely, an associate professor of social work at the University of Buffalo who studies access to reproductive health care.

After sharing the story of her two abortions with the 1 in 3 Campaign, Angie Marie Luna now helps other young women understand their reproductive rights through her work with Youth Testify.

Julia Reticker-Flynn, the director of organization and mobilization at Advocates for Youth, which runs the 1 in 3 Campaign that Luna is involved in, points out that for many people hearing these stories, abortion shifts from being strictly a political issue to one that hits closer to home.
“In theory, because abortion is common, everyone knows someone who has had one,” Reticker-Flynn says. (According to the Guttmacher Institute, roughly a quarter of all U.S. women have an abortion by age 45.) “Knowing someone in your own community has [probably] gone through this experience makes it much more personal.” And when people begin to realize that someone they work with or live next door to, or even someone they love, might very well have had an abortion, it can be transformative, she says.
Anecdotally, at least, this seems to be true. In 2015, Ohio Rep. Tim Ryan, a formerly anti-abortion Democrat, penned a widely covered op-ed in an Akron newspaper titled “Why I Changed My Thinking on Abortion.” In it, he explains that his attitude shifted after talking with women in his home state: “These women gave me a better understanding of how complex and difficult certain situations can become.”

THE SCIENCE BEHIND STORYTELLING

The rise in publicly owning one’s abortion coincides with a growing body of research on the effectiveness that storytelling has on changing people’s attitudes. A 2014 study in the journal Sociological Science found a link between a person’s attitudes on abortion and whether or not they know someone who has had the procedure; specifically, those who believed abortion should be illegal were 21 percent less likely than Americans who favor abortion rights to have heard that someone they know had one.
That’s despite the fact that elective abortions are far more common than unintended pregnancy loss, even though more people claim to know someone who has experienced a miscarriage. So how can that be? The study concluded that “individuals’ attitudes can be influenced and changed by personal information, but personal information about abortion is being carefully managed.”
Another study published in the journal Culture, Health & Sexuality in 2017 was more decisive, albeit limited in scope. In it, over a dozen women’s book clubs around the country read and discussed a nonfiction book that included stories of pregnancy and abortion. Roughly one in five women disclosed their own terminated pregnancies to their book-club peers. In surveys afterward, the majority of women reported having developed more positive feelings toward women who have abortions as well as toward abortion providers. The researchers wrote that “exposure to the stories of women who have had abortions can reduce abortion stigma.”
But people who share their personal experiences with abortion are often harassed and subjected to vitriol, especially online. The rub, of course, is that the power these stories wield directly depends on how many people hear the message.
“There’s so much silence and stigma around abortion, but when people share their stories, they create space for more people to feel like, ‘Oh, I can enter that conversation and I’m not alone,’” says Reticker-Flynn. “Storytelling inspires storytelling.”
In this way, the fight to lift the stigma that accompanies abortion has parallels to the gay rights movement. As greater numbers of people come out to family and friends, the more “normal” being gay seems to ever larger swaths of the population. In other words, it doesn’t seem to be a coincidence that as more Americans report knowing someone who is gay, the more overall support there is for gay marriage.

WHAT’S AT STAKE

Stigma exists not only on a societal level, but also a personal one. “It can be self-directed,” says Katie Gillum, the executive director of the International Network for the Reduction of Abortion Discrimination and Stigma. Mick Moran, the editor of DIY Doula: Self-Care for Before, During, & After Your Abortion, a 48-page illustrated ’zine published by The Doula Project in New York, agrees: “Sometimes even the people having the procedure hold an internal stigma about it,” Moran says. “[We tell them] this is OK, we’re not judging them, and that it’s safe for them to be there and feel whatever they’re feeling.”

A comic strip from The Doula Project’s ’zine on having an abortion, which uses illustrations, essays and games to change the conversation around the procedure.

As mentally wrenching as it can be, the consequences of self-directed stigma can lead to more than just feelings of isolation. It can actually delay care, experts say.
“It impacts the help-seeking process from beginning to end,” says Ely, the University of Buffalo researcher. “If you have a complication or question, you might be less likely to call [your caregiver] back or tell someone you’re close with that you’re having a problem because you are worried they’ll find out that you had an abortion.”
And then there are U.S. abortion laws. Or rather, the chipping away of them, mostly at the state level — another repercussion of widespread cultural stigma, say advocates.
“The real impact of stigma are the laws that we allow to go into place, which are framed in terms of, ‘We need to protect women from themselves because they don’t know what an abortion really is,’” Ely says. “One of the most damaging ways that plays out is it controls the conversation around abortion and makes it sort of a clandestine topic. And the policy that we allow to go into place based on the stigma is very troubling.”

MORE STORIES = LESS STIGMA

Ask anyone who works to destigmatize abortion, and they’ll be quick to point out the range of stories they hear from people who have had one. You can’t paint the experience with one brush stroke because no two abortions are the same — an important distinction when it comes to storytelling campaigns.
“Sometimes people try to portray the ‘perfect’ abortion story, in a rosy sort of ‘I have no regrets whatsoever’ kind of way,” Moran says. “But when we talk about stigma, it’s important to make sure that people have access to a variety of stories.”
“There’s a lot of pressure, especially around policy and advocacy storytelling, for the stories to be really positive,” adds Gillum. “But for those who get abortions the reality is that you’re going to feel a range of emotions.” If you suppress that emotional complexity, Gillum argues, then you’re not helping destigmatize the procedure.
Though she’s an activist now, Luna remembers the feelings of doubt that clouded her decision to have an abortion. Having to look at an ultrasound and listen to the fetal heartbeat certainly didn’t make things any easier for her. “I was in the waiting room and was like, ‘Is this really what I want to do? I mean, so many people have kids, why can’t I do it?’” Guilt dogged her even afterward, for a while. “I said, ‘I’m sorry, God. I hope you don’t punish me.’”
Luna ended her abusive relationship soon after her second abortion, and is now pursuing a master’s in medical physiology. With Youth Testify, she participates in retreats and workshops, and was also paired up with mentors who helped her get comfortable talking about her experience. “It really, really taught me a lot,” she says. By sharing her story, Luna hopes she can help other young people who find themselves facing the anguish of an unwanted pregnancy.
Even though Luna was initially scared to make her story public, she says, “It’s more important to me to let younger people know that abortion is health care, and through sharing my own story, I also want them to realize there is a supportive community out there.” Luna now knows she made the right decision to wait to start a family, wanting first to embark on her dream of becoming a doctor.
“And here I am,” she says, “one step closer to my dream.”
More: How Do You Heal After Pregnancy Loss? For These Couples, the Answer Is Publicly

‘Bye-Bye Bikini’: Miss America Nixes Swimsuit Competition

If you were hoping to see women clad in bikinis and slinky evening gowns parade onstage at next year’s Miss America pageant, you’ll be disappointed.
That’s because the nearly 100-year-old contest as we have all come to know it is no more. In its place: a more body-inclusive, #MeToo-friendly display in which contestants won’t be judged on their physical appearance.
In fact, it isn’t even a pageant anymore, says Gretchen Carlson, who won the title in 1989 and now chairs the Miss America Organization’s board of trustees.
“We are no longer a pageant. We are a competition,” Carlson announced today on Good Morning America. “We’ve heard from a lot of young women who say, ‘We’d love to be a part of your program, but we don’t want to be out there in high heels and a swimsuit.’ So guess what? You don’t have to do that anymore.”
In an era where the #MeToo movement has given more power to women’s voices, the shift from a largely looks-based pageant to a competition centered on women’s talents and achievements is long overdue.
In 1968, amid the backdrop of the country’s cultural wars, the women’s rights movement was on the forefront of protesting the Miss America pageant for not only its racial politics but also for the overt way it exploited and sexualized women.
“Has anything changed since 1968, when hundreds of feminists gathered on the [Atlantic City] boardwalk to protest the Miss America pageant?,” asked Blain Roberts in an op-ed for The New York Times. “Yes and no.”
It wasn’t until this year that Miss America announced that the organization would be led by an all-female team, after the Huffington Post reported that prominent male executives and board members, including the pageant’s CEO, were demoralizing women in emails.
Now, with an all-women board made up of former winners, the organization is enacting dramatic changes.
Even the organization’s website is getting an overhaul with the site promoting the upcoming “Miss America 2.0” and pushing the hashtag #ByeByeBikini.


“We’re experiencing a cultural revolution in our country with women finding the courage to stand up and have their voices heard on many issues,” Carlson said, in response to how the #MeToo movement has helped the organization restructure itself. “Miss America is proud to evolve as an organization and join this empowerment movement.”
The news has sparked a debate online, with people on both sides weighing in:
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Battling Discrimination on the Battlefield

I will never forget the moment when I was told I wouldn’t do much in my life.
I was in high school in the Bronx, where I grew up, and one of my grades had dipped to a C. I was called into a counselor’s office. She was on the phone with my parents.
“With these grades,” I remember her saying, “she’ll only be a secretary.”
Before that moment, I had wanted to be a doctor. I wanted to do something good and help people. Maybe it was the color of my skin, maybe it was the expectations of women back then. Whatever it was, after that moment, I knew that I would have to fight harder to get what I wanted.
I went to nursing school right after high school. And though I had never considered a career in the armed forces, serving people has always been a part of what I do — it’s part of the job, being a nurse. You care for people. You do no harm.
So when, at 30 years old, I was recruited to be a nurse for the Army, I didn’t think much of it. It was another opportunity to serve. The recruiter came to the hospital I was working at and, along with my friend, we were sworn in — right in front of our patients.

Battling Discrimination 2
After retiring from the military, Annette Tucker Osborne became the Brooklyn, New York, chapter president of the National Association of Black Military Women.

From there, we were sent off to basic training at Fort Devens in Massachusetts. From the moment we arrived to the moment we left, we were all told the same thing: You are not different. As a woman, it was actually refreshing to hear, because it was the opposite of degrading. If a man had to run this long, so did you. If a man had to do this work, so did you. We were equals in that camp.
But that’s not to say that prejudice doesn’t exist in the military, despite how diverse it is.
In 2012, when I was deployed to Kuwait, I was brought into a base camp as chief nurse to help oversee  soldier health. When I met the officer — a white man from Alabama — he looked at me, then looked down at my résumé. He couldn’t put the two together. He seemed unable to equate a black woman with the well-polished and extremely qualified person on paper.
“Sir,” I told him. “What you see on that résumé is me. I’ve worked hard for what’s on my résumé.”
After working together for quite a long time, he eventually came to trust me. After all, he kind of needed to, if he wanted to know what was going on medically with our soldiers.
And then, out in the desert, there were some young service members who don’t want to salute you. I’d stop a few every now and then, asking if they could see my rank as an Army colonel.
After I retired from the service, I was approached by the National Association of Black Military Women, a national organization dedicated to providing support and visibility for women just like me.
As the president of the Brooklyn chapter, which has only been around for a year, I’ve already seen tremendous success in our effort to get the word out to other women that they are not alone. There is a place for them in the military, as well as afterward. We aim to make the point to young women of color, just like it was made to me back in basic, that you are not different. You are just as strong. Continue to persevere and know your goals.
Take it from me: No one can tell you what you can and can’t be in your future.

As told to staff writer Joseph Darius Jaafari. This essay has been edited for style and clarity. Read more stories of service here.

Finding Safety, and Community, at the Only Gun Range in Manhattan

Lauren Hartnett wants to protect herself.
At 19 years old, she went through an abusive relationship. It was then, she says, when she began thinking about how owning a gun might make her safer.
“This is the ultimate form of feminism,” Hartnett tells NationSwell. In the era of #MeToo, she says, taking self-defense classes have never seemed so important or, for that matter, topical. “Nobody is in control of you but yourself.”
Hartnett, now 28 and a paramedic in New York City, has never had to use a gun to defend herself, but she continues to practice and attend meetups at her local shooting range. What started as a means to defend herself has now blossomed into a hobby.
Hartnett’s not alone; she’s one of a growing number of women who have turned to firearms not just for protection, but as a way to foster stronger community bonds.
Filling the gaps in an activity that heavily skews male are the pistol-packing women who believe, despite all the controversy surrounding guns, that sharing and enjoying the sport with other women makes it a worthwhile pursuit. For these unlikely female gun enthusiasts, coming together despite the judgments of many of their urban-dwelling neighbors isn’t as important as carving out a supportive, safe space in New York, a city where they are vastly outnumbered.
Hartnett takes pride in being one of the few female firearms instructors in New York City. This summer, she hopes to expand the number of women interested in shooting when she launches the NYC chapter of A Girl and a Gun, a shooting club exclusively for women with locations across the U.S.
“I was pleasantly surprised,” says Hartnett of the more than 150 responses she received after putting out a call on Facebook to join the chapter.
Among those who support Hartnett are women like Tina Wilson-Cohen, who has  marksmanship experience as a former Secret Service agent but couldn’t find an avenue to share it. Or Lauren Silberman, who was intrigued by guns and wanted to satisfy her curiosity. Or Javondlynn Dunagan, who says that living in the notoriously dangerous neighborhood of South Chicago had given her anxiety over guns. Now, though, she’s a firearms teacher and leading the way for other women in her community.
For the women who frequent shooting galleries — in Manhattan, there’s just one, the Westside Rifle & Pistol Range in Chelsea — their reasons for being there are just as diverse and nuanced as the women themselves: Some love the camaraderie and the chance to build new relationships, others enjoy the simple joy of practicing the sport, while still more are there to sharpen their self-defense skills.

Gun Ranges 2
Lauren Hartnett found solace in the gun community after going through an abusive relationship.

Although a recent analysis of FBI and National Crime Victimization data suggests that women rarely use guns for defense, gun-range members interviewed believe that women are a fast-growing segment of the gun-owning population.
As it stands, it’s unclear if women are, in fact, racing to get strapped. White men are still the most likely to own a firearm, according to a 2017 Pew study. Women as a whole only make up about 22 percent of all gun owners, with non-white women accounting for just over 15 percent. Still, the gender gap has narrowed since the 1980s, but that’s usually credited to the decline in firearm ownership among men.
During the day, Silberman flies under the radar as a professor of Renaissance English literature at Baruch College in New York City. But outside of office hours, she can be found at Westside loading up a firearm and picking off targets.
The professor tries to shoot once a week — it’s good practice for hand-eye coordination, she says — and she’s a proud member of the New York Women’s Shooting Sports League (WSSL).
“The last thing in the world on your mind is anything unpleasant,” says Silberman, who believes that women-only shooting clubs demystifies guns. “I like the camaraderie; I like hanging out with different people.”
WSSL stresses its nonpartisan appeal, and its members believe that shooting isn’t only for conservatives or men. In its 18-year history, WSSL has introduced several hundred women to the art of marksmanship.
“Most have come and gone, and that’s OK because they had a good time,” says Barry Cohen, one of three male instructors for the women’s group. “They learn that you can do something sporting with a firearm.”
Valeri Jean-Pierre found out about the club via Meetup. The first time she met the group, at Westside in February, she was late. And nervous. She had never held a .22 long rifle before.
It took a while for Jean-Pierre to get a handle on loading, aiming and shooting the rifle. She later joked about not being able to put “all of those things together.” But then — with ease — she loaded the magazine, leaned her head onto the stock, leveled her right eye with the barrel and shot.
“If you have some type of issues that you want to let out, this is a good recreational activity to do so,” says Jean-Pierre, who plans to come back to the range.
For $75, Westside visitors who don’t have a gun permit can check out a .22-caliber rifle and one box of ammunition. All first-time shooters, in addition to a background check, must also undergo 15 minutes of safety instruction. After certified teachers cover the nuts and bolts of how rifles work, gun enthusiasts can choose one of the 16 shooting points — some with targets 50 feet away — and begin firing.
Most of the women who come to shoot at Westside say they’re nonpartisan, driven less by political ideology than their desire for a good time.  
“Your political views don’t matter here, because we’re all equals,” says Darren Leung, Westside’s owner. (He’s being tongue-in-cheek: Prominently displayed in the range is Michael J. Knowles’ Reasons to Vote for Democrats: A Comprehensive Guide, which is 260 pages of blank paper.)
Wilson-Cohen, the former Secret Service agent who coaches women interested in military or law enforcement careers, says that keeping politics out of the range is important to her group, “She Can Shoot,” a league with several chapters and more than 3,000 members across the country. She’s proud of the way the club’s members come together to lend a hand to beginners, no matter their backgrounds.
Most of the women interviewed acknowledge that guns can be problematic, especially in the wake of high-profile mass shootings and increased international scrutiny over America’s lax gun regulations.
“At what point do we arm everybody and then we stick the gun in the wrong hands?” asks Wilson-Cohen, adding that she keeps an eye open for potential red flags, like if a shooter is unwilling to explain why she wants to join the club.
How much traction newly proposed gun-control measures gain remains to be seen, but for these women, that largely misses the point: Yes, guns are weapons that can take people down, but they’re also tools that can build communities up.