HeForShe campaign arrives in Mongolia
On July 8, the HeForShe Campaign will be launched in Mongolia by the United Nations Population Fund. The launching of the campaign is to take place at the State Palace with 800 attendees.
Head of the HeForShe movement Elizabeth Nyamayaro, who is also a political scientist and senior advisor to Under Secretary General and Executive Director to UN Women, will take part in the event.
On September 14 last year, UN Women Goodwill Ambassador Emma Watson gave a speech for the HeForShe campaign at the United Nations headquarters. Throughout her speech, the actress mentioned a number of reasons as to why the concept of feminism is ideal for men too, and how feminism can improve the mental health of men. It was shocking for the audience across the globe to hear that suicide rates in men increased by 24 percent in the past 15 years and how this is due to the distorted notion of masculinity and the expectations placed on men.
Furthermore, Watson stated that feminism benefits both family life and society as a whole because children need their father in their lives. Women are expected to take care of the home and the children, which is why men end up missing a certain percentage of their child’s early life. This may potentially end up developing long term psychological effects on the child as well.
The campaign’s goals are to bring together one half of humanity in support of the other half of humanity, for the benefit of all.
The campaign was launched all over the world, including Africa, America, Caribbean Arab States, North Africa, Asia and the Pacific and Europe and Central Asia. In less than three weeks, the UN Women Campaign is set to be launched in Ulaanbaatar too.
A large portion of the Mongolian population are nomadic herders. After the socialist support for nomads were cut off, many families abandoned herding and moved to the city. However, the ancient stereotype of women taking care of household duties still abides like law and some girls are kept out of school to look after her siblings and the home. Due to low education and lack of awareness about their rights, many women are abused and their human rights violated.
Additionally, more women than men in Mongolia are unemployed. Private companies are hesitant to accept female workers. They claim that young women either take extended leaves or drop out of the labor force when they become pregnant. The United Nations Development Program released in a report that “there is a wage gap in Mongolia. Women are under-represented in sectors with higher pay”. Moreover, there has been a significant increase in the number of female-headed households because of male unemployment, which results in dire rates of alcoholism, crime and domestic abuse.
Mongolian women are faced with many difficulties as large portion of Mongolians living under the poverty line are female-headed households. However, as stated in Asia Societies, an encouraging trend is the recognition of the serious problems facing Mongolian women where educated women have banded together to form non-governmental organizations to protect and educate woman in the labor force, including the Women Entrepreneurs of Mongolia and Women for Change.
Hopefully with the launch of the HeForShe campaign, men and women will become more educated on the matters of gender equality and understand how feminism does not only benefit women but men as well.
In such manner, in order for Mongolia to prosper, all resources need to be allocated evenly. More employment for women would result in more economic growth as there are more people employed in the economy. The ultimate goal of HeForShe in Mongolia is to eventually have 500,000 men stand for women’s rights.