It’s official! The 2018 Winter Olympics have begun in PyeongChang, South Korea. Don’t worry if you missed the first couple days because the games will take place until February 25th, so you have plenty of time to catch up. This is an Olympics of many firsts and records. 92 countries will be performing in this Winter Olympics which is the highest number of any Winter Olympics in history. There are also 242 athletes on the United States team which is a record for any country in the Winter Olympics. This Olympics also showcases the first openly gay male figure skater, Adam Rippon, who actually hails from Scranton, Pennsylvania. While there have been gay Olympic athletes, they have only ever came out after the Olympics, never beforehand which is what Adam Rippon has done.

So while it is great that there are openly gay men in the Olympics, it is important to also talk about women in the Olympics as well, considering this is a blog about women’s rights. The fact is this: women are still not equal to men in the Olympics. There are more men participating in the Olympics than women, still to this day. In 2014, 40.3% of people in the Olympics were women while 59.7% of participants were women. Another fact that is pretty startling is that 2012 was the first year that women have been able to participate in every Olympic sport at the Games. This was just six years ago. Six years ago was the first time that women were able to participate in every sport. This is flabbergasting because you would think by the 21st century, women would have been able to be equal to men in athletics but that was not the case. However, this all depended on which country the women came from because not all countries had the same women’s rights as say, the United States. Also, many sports took longer than others to be open to women in the Olympics. For example, the first sports to be open to women in 1900 were tennis, sailing, croquet, equestrian, and golf while the last sport to become open to women in 2012 was boxing. So it only took 112 years for women to be fully included in the Olympics which is 112 years too long in my book.

Here are some key dates in Olympics history of women’s participation in the games:

• In 1900, women first participated in the Games in Paris, France. 22 women out of 997 athletes participated in only five sports: golf, tennis, croquet, and equestrian. In these Games, women made up 2.2% of athletes.
• In 1904, archery became open to women.
• In 1908, skating became open to women.
• In 1912, aquatic sports and events became open to women’s participation.

• 1928 was a very big year for women because it was the year that athletes and gymnastics became open to women. This change in rules bumped up women’s participation in the Games to almost 10%.
• In 1936, skiing became open for women to participate in.
• In 1960, after 60 years of women participating in the Olympics, women made up over 20% of participants in the Games.
• In 1981, two women were actually co-opted to be IOC Members. This means that they were put on the Olympic board and were able to help make decisions about the Olympics.
• In 1996, the first women’s sports was introduced: softball.
  • It is important to note that softball is no longer part of the Olympcis.
• In 2000, the IOC World Conference on Women in sport adopted the following resolution: The Olympic Movement must reserve at least 20 percent of decision-making positions for women within their structures by the end of 2005.” This was very important for women in the decision-making process of the Olympics and gave them a voice in the Games.

• The amendment made in 2000 was changed in 2012 at the 5th World Conference on Women and Sport, “The IOC should revisit and review the minimum number of women to be included in leadership roles which it set for its constituents, and set up a mechanism to monitor and ensure that this minimum number is being respected.”
• Finally in 2012, women participated in all sports at the Olympics when boxing was made open for women to participate in.

Now here are some important women who made great strides in the Olympics:

• In 1972, Lorna Johnston was 70 years when she rode at the 1972 Games and became the oldest woman to ever compete in the Olympic Games.
• In 1984, Joan Benoit was the first women’s Olympic marathon in los Angeles.
• In 1952, Maria Gorokhovskaya set a record for the most medals won by a woman in one Olympics, with two gold and five silver medals.

While the Games have always been a male-dominated industry, women are making strides in creating equality in sports, but we are still not there yet. We have clearly made strides from 1900, going from 2.2% of women participating to almost 50% participating in 2018. We are not at full equality yet but we are almost there. We just have to keep supporting women and making sure that we do not stop making our voices heard until we are at 50% participation for women. Stay tuned in the Olympics and keep your eyes peeled on the amazing women participating like hockey player Amanda Kessel and bobsledder Elena Meyers Taylor. Good luck ladies!

Having access to education is something I have always taken for granted. I have been in school since I was four year old, starting in preschool. Every since then, I have always been in school. I went to elementary school, grade school, middle school, high school, and now college. Not continuing school was never an option for me, I was always going to go to school and get a higher education. Growing up, I always thought school was the biggest drag, I always hated having to do homework and study for tests. There were points as a child where I wanted to just drop out of school because it was so annoying and frivolous to me. However, as I got older, especially in highschool, I realized how lucky I was to get an good quality education, especially as a woman.

So here is the question: why are there more than 130 million girls out of school? Education is a key part of strategies to improve an individual’s well-being as well as a society’s economic and social development. In the Middle East and North Africa, access to education has improved dramatically over the years, especially the past few decades, and there have been encouraging trends in women’s education, but it is still now where it needs to be. The challenges still remain. Many people, especially women, are still excluded from education. Many women are enrolled in school but are not learning anything that prepares them for 21st century job markets.

There are many benefits of female education for women’s empowerment and gender equality are clearly very important:

• As female education rises, fertility, population growth, and infant and child mortality fall and family health improves.
• Increases in girls’ secondary school enrollment are associated with increases in women’s participation in the labor force and their contribution to household and national income.
• Women’s increased wage earnings has had a positive effect on child on nutrition.
• Child of educated mothers are more likely to be enrolled in school and are known to have higher levels of education attainment.
• Educated women are more likely to be more politically active and better informed about their legal rights and how to actually use and exercise them.

Education’s Effects on Reproductive Choices and Employment

225 million women in developing countries are not able to plan their own families which then leads to the 74 million unplanned pregnancies and 36 million abortions every year. With this. education is the single most important determinant of both age at marriage as well as age at first giving birth. For example, those who had no education were married at eighteen and had their first child by twenty years old. Competitively, those who had a secondary education or higher education got married at the age of twenty-three and had their first baby at the age of twenty-five. This shows how women are more prepared to have children and get married when they are more prepared and ready for children. Educated women generally want and have smaller families as well as make better use of reproductive health. They are also more prepared with planning family information and services in achieving their desired family size. Because of this, educated women tend to have healthier families.

A reason that educated women are able to have smaller families is because they can know about contraception. Women who are more educated tend to know about wider range of methods and where to get these available methods. Also educated women are more likely to actually discuss and have a conversation with their husbands about what kind of family they want and how many children they would like to have. An important part of family planning and a woman’s ability to choose the number and timing of their births is key to the empowerment of women as not only mothers, but individuals and citizens. It is a sad reality that many women are not able to choose how they want to live and what kind of family they want. If we want to stop this and empower women, we need to give all women, especially in developing countries, a greater access to education. All women deserve the chance to make their own choices in life and that starts with knowing that they have these rights, and that will happen through education.

Poverty

Poverty is the biggest factor on whether a girl can access education. While children from rich families will most likely attend all levels of basic education, children from poor families are less likely to attend school, and girls have an even smaller percentage of school attendance. So, there are many factors that can contribute to girls not being able to attend school but the biggest one is the lack of free education. One reason for the lack of free education is because governments do not have legal and policy frameworks in place to make free education a reality. With free education not being a reality, it adds a financial burden on families, whether it be in the form of school fees, uniforms, exam fees, or school education to name a few. International human rights law imposes obligations on states to ensure that no one impairs the right to education. There is global action to tackle poverty through sustainable development has focused on gender inequality and education. There have been movements to improve gender equality, quality education and women empowerment by achieving sustainable development and by adopting various goals, targets, and indicators that are aligned with human rights laws.

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