If my 17-year-old self saw the timetable I made for my fourth year of journalism school, she would laugh.
Public relations? Really?
It’s quite often seen as “the dark side” of journalism.
But I’m pretty excited, and the mission for this class is definitely not borrowing anything from the movie Thank You For Smoking.
Our fourth-year seminars are very practical at Carleton University, and this class will actually let me work with five other people to plan a real PR campaign for a non-profit organization in Ottawa. I jumped at the chance to study MATCH International, a group that seeks (with feminist leanings) sustainable development in the global south by empowering its women.
I was astounded that this was one of my options. I’m in the middle of putting together applications for gender/international development graduate programs, so this was right up my alley. I can’t wait to learn more about it and see how communications and development can collide.
Right now our job is to research the non-profit, the political climate, and so on, to get an idea of what we’re working with. I stumbled upon these statistics on the organization’s website and I just wanted to share them so you could get an idea of how desperately women need this assistance. Hopefully with time the facts and figures will be less startling and MATCH can fully realize its goal.
Did you know…
70% of the 1.3 billion people living in poverty around the world are women.(1)
Women do about 66% of the world’s work in return for less than 5% of its income. (2)
2/3 of the children denied primary education are girls while 75% of the 876 million illiterate adults in the world are women. (3)
Women log 2/3 of the world’s working hours and produce half of the world’s food, yet earn only 10% of the world’s income and own less than 1% of the world’s property. (4)
90% of casualties of armed conflicts since 1945 have been civilians, 3/4 of which are women and children – there are over 35 major conflicts going on in the world today.
60 million are people displaced by conflict and disaster worldwide, 75% of whom are women and children who often face hardships like sexual violence and abuse. (5)
1 in 4 women worldwide will experience rape or sexual violence in her lifetime while 25-75% of women are beaten regularly at home, depending on the country. (6)
Over 120 million women have endured female genital mutilation. (7)
More than half a million women die every year while giving birth – one per minute – mostly in developing countries.
Women hold only 12% of parliamentary seats worldwide.
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(1) source: World Revolution
(2) source: Women’s International Network
(3) source: AskWoman
(4) source: World Development Indicators, 1997, Womankind Worldwide
(5) source: UN WomenWatch
(6) source: 2006 UN Report on Violence Against Women
