Emma Watson's Speech On Gender Equality

Emma Watson is a British actress and she is Goodwill Ambassador for United Nations Women. She gave an important speech on Saturday September 20, 2014, about gender inequality and how to fight it. She launched the ‘HeForShe’ initiative, and the main objective is to get men and boys involved in the fight for gender equality. At the United Nations the speech took thirteen minutes and made the very important point that the stereotypes for women as well as men have to change, the pattern of expectations is harmful and destructive. This has to change in order to achieve gender equality.

Emma Watson’s main goal is to “mobilize as many men and boys as possible to be advocates for change […] we want to try and make sure it is tangible” (Watson). She

Emma Watson decided for herself that she was a feminist but came across a lot of negative reactions because “I’m among the ranks of women whose expressions are seen as to strong, too aggressive, isolating, and anti-men. Unattractive, even” (Watson). Women are afraid to call themselves feminists because of this, these connotations are so black and white that maybe people have become afraid of fighting for women’s equal rights. Emma Watson tells her personal story why she decided she was a feminist. “When I was 8, I was confused for being called bossy because I wanted to direct all the plays that we would put on for our parents, but the boys were not. When at 14, I started to be sexualized by certain elements of the media. When at 15, my girlfriends started dropping out of sports teams because they didn’t want to appear muscly” (Watson). This has to do with the representation of masculinity and femininity “later studies informed by poststructuralism regard all representations as cultural constructions and not as reflections of a real world” (Barker 316). We get these stereotypes from watching television or movies, in which women are represented often as negative and having bad character traits. A study done by Diana Meehan “suggested that representations on

The percentage in Sweden was 74.1 percent, in the United States it was 59.7 percent, Great Britain 58.3 percent, and in the Netherlands 35.5 percent (Sainsbury 138). The rates in 2013 are for Sweden 60,3 percent, Great Britain 55,7 percent, the United States 56,3 percent and the Netherlands 58,5 percent (“Labor Force Participation Rate”). So there have been some shifts during the last 2 decades, which is a positive thing that women are more engaging on the labor market. But in order for that to happen girls need to have education and not all girls have those opportunities, as Emma Watson says “My life is a sheer privilege because my parents didn’t love me less because I was born a daughter. My school did not limit me because I was a girl. My mentors didn’t assume that I would go less far because I might give birth to a child one day. These influences were the gender equality ambassadors that made me who I am today. They may not know it, but they are the inadvertent feminists that are changing the world today. We need more of those” (Watson).

Emma Watson makes another strong point by giving an example “In 1997, Hillary Clinton made a famous speech in Beijing about women’s rights […] what stood out for me the most was that less than thirty percent of the audience were male. How