The Start of a New Journey

Today is a great day for us. Not only is the start of No Woman Held Back, but also the beginning of an uncertain and exciting journey. Our aim is to start a dialogue with all of you to increase our understanding of challenges that matters to all of us -women and men. Which challenges? As you can imagine (No Woman Held Back?), our main drive will be any situation that is holding back women against their will. That is, we will try to fathom circumstances where something or someone holds back women, even though they are striving to change their lives.

In the following months I will be writing from India, where I will be working for PRADAN, an NGO with over four hundred professionals working with 1.5 million people in 5,000 villages across central and eastern India. What am I going to be working on? I will try to understand the reason why infant girls are more underweight than boys. Furthermore, why severe underweight prevalence fell more for boys (by 23.7%) than for girls (by 10.8%). 

The answer to these questions matters. Is it prejudices such as cultural norms what is causing this gap? Is it parent’s preferences? Is it future higher potential earnings what is driving higher investments in boys? Each of these questions has a specific (and different) solution. If you try to solve the nutritional gender gap by changing social norms, when in fact it was the parent’s preferences what was causing it, you will be wasting important resources with a wrong solution.

Finally, I want to give special thanks to Harvard’s Women and Public Policy Program (WAPPP) and to supporters of the Cultural Bridge fellowship for providing me a grant to make the summer trip possible. Both are fundamental organizations trying to increase gender equality. Why they promote projects like mine? Because they believe –as most of us- that by closing the gender gap in economic participation, political opportunity, health, and education, we will improve not only the lives of women but also of men.