The Global Importance of Women’s Education
By: Maddie Ash
Tags: Education, Climate Change, Feminism, Womens Rights, Womens Health

So many women are denied an education across the globe, whether it be because it is illegal or because of societal constructs, and we’re seeing this internationally.

I am going to make a bold statement.

Educating all the women of the world would solve the population crisis.

Instead of finding solutions that will inevitably stop working as the population continues to rise like GMO’s to make our cows fatter and our tomatoes plumper or simply plowing down forests (and thus perpetuating the climate crisis) to make room for more farmland, we could just EDUCATE THE WOMEN OF OUR WORLD.

Now starting over, I believe very deeply that education is a human right. Taking population out of the equation, these women, specifically in developing countries, are consistently being denied of their goals, dreams and potentials. And our global society, in turn, is denying itself of their brains; of their ideas — of the contributions they could offer to the improvement of our world.

So, while this SHOULD be enough for the world to get behind the empowerment of women and girls in their societies, I appeal to it with a rarer argument.

(As a disclaimer, I do want to add that I acknowledge that many things need to happen to combat the climate and population crisis, however this is a commonly looked over and extremely important one.)

Researchers like Jungho Kim in “Female Education and its Impact of fertility”, have found that in “developed” countries, like the United States, where women are provided an education, we see that there are substantially less children being born per woman and far more women seeking birth control methods. In “developing” countries, women are having many, many babies while having virtually no access to reproductive health attention, contraceptives or education. And if they are provided education, they commonly end up having to stay home to fulfill societal duties at home, or for reasons regarding their safety, particularly from sexual violence.

So we see here, a strong, unrelenting correlation between women’s empowerment and education and the amount of babies per woman.

This proven finding has even been acknowledged by the United Nations. In the Paris Agreement on climate change, they stressed the importance of women’s education in developing countries on fighting climate change and included this in their extensive plan.

For my project, I made some paintings that reflect the importance that women have in society, not just as moms, but as intellectuals and individuals. All in all we are depriving ourselves of great minds. In the U.S. and other alike countries we have great examples of why we can’t suppress female minds. Think Greta Thunberg. She has greatly affected policy and the climate justice movement. How many Gretas and future leaders are having their potentials stolen from them? And where would our world be if we had never begun denying women of their own rights?

In these paintings, I mainly used the symbolism of color as well as nature in the first painting to exemplify the importance of individuality and the beauty that prevails on the inside.