Why we need an International Day of the Girl

As a girl growing up in 1970s Toronto, I took gender equality for granted. Among my peers, children played all the same schoolyard games (tag, ball and hopscotch) and wore all the same clothes (cords, T-shirts and sneakers). We scoffed at old-fashioned ideas of prescribed sexuality and gender, like pink colours only for girls or team sports only for boys. We were raised on the “Free to Be You and Me” style of humanism which encouraged individual achievements and preached equality among all genders, races and cultures.

I took those early lessons as absolute; but as I grew into adulthood and expanded my world view, I learned that equality and equity were very different.

After university, I interned at the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM, now called UN Women). I was exposed to the lived realities of a majority of girls around the world. Routinely abused, forced out of school and into marriage, denied opportunities and depicted as objects, girls were facing a cruel sexism that sought to demean and destroy their power.

Suddenly I was faced with the fundamental flaw in the notion of equality: We don’t all start from the same place. A garden that’s been neglected and trampled won’t thrive with an equal amount of water and sunshine as a garden that’s been seeded and nourished.

Girl children, as a group, have been treated unfairly for generations. I finally recognized that they needed more than an equal share of attention to achieve equity.

Another Canadian was also thinking hard about these issues. The Honourable Rona Ambrose, former minister for the status of women, was similarly inspired by the children she met through the UN, so she set about to create an formal day to annually recognize the unique challenges faced by girl children. In 2011, she advocated the Canadian Parliament and then the entire UN to make today, Oct. 11, the International Day of the Girl.

Of course, the most important people she wanted to hear this message were children. So together (along with illustrator Simone Shin) we created a children’s book called “The International Day of the Girl: Celebrating Girls Around the World.”

When considering how best to represent the innumerable challenges faced by more than half the children of the world, as well as how those children are meeting those challenges and creating change for the better, we knew that one story just wouldn’t do.

After months of research, common themes began to emerge and intersect: security and safety, education and access to power, vulnerability and voicing opinions. I interviewed dozens of amazing children who told me how they were using their strength, intelligence, creativity, inventiveness, bravery, talent, kindness, humour and ambition to make life better.

Minister Ambrose introduced me to a young woman in Cameroon who had used video technology to educate her community about the dangers of child marriage.I contacted a girl in the U.S. who hosts a robotics vlog online. And Cindy Blackstock connected me with a sibling of the late Cree activist Shannen Koostachin.

To protect their privacy, the book fictionalizes these stories to illustrate each theme in a positive and child-friendly way. Prompted by my young son asking me why I thought girls were “so much better than boys,” I used the garden metaphor to explain why this one particular group needed a special day, as an extra hand up. Each character has a floral name from their own language, such as Flora (“flower”) from Brazil, who overcomes sexism in sport through capoeira. Or Lilya (“lily”) from Russia, who uses computer technology to help make her town wheelchair-accessible.

There’s Hana (“flower”) from Afghanistan who learns to read in secret, and Sokannon from Attawapiskat in Canada, who drives a national movement for safe schools in First Nations. Shannen Koostachin, who inspired this story, sadly passed away. I chose the Algonquin word for “rain” as her character, because her brave story will continue to nourish the imaginations of girls from above.

Today, we invite you to mark the International Day of the Girl, to reflect on the obstacles girls face and to celebrate their achievements, for a more equitable future.