Because I am a Girl Blog

Today I learned that its possible to see gender discrimination as divided into five areas: invisibility, capacity, physically and mentally, family and household responsibilities, and traditions and customs.

Invisibility

This includes pre-birth gender selection, lack of birth registration and public environments, which are unsafe for girls, marginalising them and discouraging their visibility.

Capacity

This affects the full ability of girls to benefit from all of their Convention rights. Impaired capacity is contributed to, for example, by educational curricula, which reinforce negative gender stereotyping, and by preferential access to nutrition within families for boys.

Physically and Mentally

This includes gender based violence and trafficking, temporary marriages, and judgemental attitudes to sexual activity of girls, limiting their access to preventative measures and other health services including HIV/AIDS.

Family and Household Responsibilities

This includes discrimination caused by lower minimum ages of marriage for girls and the sexual and economic exploitation of girls as domestic workers.

Traditions and Customs

This includes embedded religious, judicial and secular traditions, which allow for the creation of status offences discriminating against girls in the legal system and inequality in inheritance.

This conceptualization was presented by Geraldine Van Bueren in the 2007 Because I am a Girl Report which comments on the state of the world’s girls.  I think its really useful, because sometimes its easy to forget some of the less obvious ways that girls can be marginalized – while physical discrimination is in your face, the areas of invisibility and capacity are less obvious but just as important.