Dima El Hassan

Today marks the U.N. International Day of the Girl, a day that celebrates her potential, her power and her unique place in the world. It is a day to recognize her as a source of power, energy and creativity while highlighting the challenges and inequalities she faces and promoting her empowerment and the fulfillment of her human rights.

Girls experience inequality in all aspects of their lives. There is an outrageously huge number of ways in which they are discriminated against and a disappointingly minimal amount of concern being given to their gender issues.

On this special day, I’d like to show how hard it is to be a girl. Since the beginning of human history, the world has really evolved, in many ways and on many levels. Yet, when it comes to gender issues, we have to admit that humanity is still backward despite all the advancements we have achieved across human history. Instead of investing righteously in the world’s 1.1 billion girls as being sources of power, energy and creativity, we keep on limiting their creativeness and ability to become true agents of change.

Yes, it is hard to be a girl in this ever-challenging world. From the day she is born, the girl is doomed to fight. Being born is her first challenge. Sex-ratio imbalances are still recorded in favor of boy children in many countries of the world, notably in South, East and Central Asia. The 2017 U.N. report “Progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals” shows how this distorted demographic “masculinization” is not a natural phenomenon but rather an intentional action toward elimination of girls. The prenatal sex selection leads today to distorted levels of sex ratio at birth. This is explained by the high intensity of gender discrimination and son preference in many cultures and also the “misuse” of scientific and technological progress in pre-natal sex-detection, all leading to serious social, cultural, political and economic implications.

Getting education is the girl’s second challenge. The Global Education Monitoring Report shows that almost twice as many girls as boys will never have the chance to enter school.

Even if she challenged her surrounding and succeeded in entering primary school, she may be forced to drop out before reaching secondary, should her family want her to marry young. And here comes the third challenge: Nearly one in four girls are reported as being married before age 18.

Once surpassing these three challenges, the labor world becomes her biggest hurdle, showing her real superpower but at the same time the real world’s injustice and conspiracy against her simply because ... she is a girl! Records show that girls between the ages of 5 and 14 spend 40 perent more time doing unpaid domestic work than boys. Even if she then gets into paid work, she will often still earn less than the male for the same work. As for the career path, women are still under-represented in managerial positions – in some countries they hold less than one-third of such positions. Furthermore, women’s participation in national Parliaments is still relatively low at 23.4 percent.

Among all these already encumbering obstacles, comes the mostly atrocious one that she has to face: violence, most notably sexual assault and rape. According to the 2017 U.N. Secretary-General Report, “19 percent of women between 15 and 49 years old had experienced physical and/or sexual violence by an intimate partner. In the extreme cases, such violence can lead to death. In 2012, 47 percent of all women who were victims of intentional homicide worldwide were killed by an intimate partner or family member, compared to 6 percent of male victims.”

Where does all this lead us if no matter how hard we try, in this 21st century we are searching to secure women’s right to equality and justice?

There are so many unusual challenges girls are facing today, from injustice met in their society, community and workplace, to injustice in opportunities in education, gender violence and many others.

It is vital for the world to know about such unfairness that otherwise can be turned into a golden opportunity for a better world. Many have recognized that and thus agreed to set the fifth Sustainable Development Goal to achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls by 2030. Can we really make it? Till then, the girl is always a rebel and will remain in a constant state of rebellion, just like our developing country, always in the never-ending phase of development ... a dynamic dormant giant handcuffed with extra powerful challenges.