This Sunday marks the International Day of the Girl, a day used to amplify the voices of girls and advocate for gender equality. With this year’s Day of the Girl theme being “my voice, our equal future” we can’t help but wonder what it will take to get us to a truly equal society. This year has only shown us that we have become a country divided in more ways than one. And with discrimination baked into the fabric of America, we activists have our work cut out for us.
Even with the annual celebration of girl and womanhood that happens on Day of the Girl, there is still an overrepresentation of the masculine in our society. And as we prepare for election day, the overfunding of masculinist policies in America is glaring. Weapons, wars, and prisons seem to get most of our economic attention, while the feminine sectors like health, education, and childcare are severely undervalued.
Not only is this manifested in our economic systems but also in our personal ideologies. The American Dream is thought to be something that can be achieved with hard work—pulling yourself up by your bootstraps. This idea makes policies that defy rugged individualism—like social welfare programs—taboo and often frowned upon. These masculine value systems that put the individual over community make it too easy to dismiss those in need. As our founder Jennifer Siebel Newsom said, “If someone’s suffering, is it really that, that person’s lazy? No, it’s more likely that we as a society have failed that individual.”
When intersections of race, class, gender, and other aspects of identity play a huge role in your ability to thrive in our country, it’s not only unfair to spout such a thing—it’s irresponsible. When we uphold these values, we contribute to the systems of oppression by putting the onus on the victims of domination.
With the release of Jennifer Siebel Newsom’s third documentary, The Great American Lie, we at The Representation Project want to lead the way in creating systemic justice for everyone. We’re calling on Americans to wake up and shift from an overly masculine value set of money, power, and abuse, to one that sees the value in the “feminized” attributes like empathy, collaboration, and community. To do so, we’re asking you to raise your voice using the hashtag #ValueEquality.
Take action! You either value equality, or you don’t. Watch The Great American Lie now on Apple TV, Amazon TV, and on-demand. Support empathy, collaboration, and community in our society and share how you on social media with our hashtag #ValueEquality. Download our #ValueEquality graphic below.
