Women’s rights are human rights.

It seems this should be obvious and indisputable. Women and girls make up about half of the world’s population, and therefore at least half of humankind’s potential. Data and evidence have shown over and over that when all women are valued and empowered, when they can make their own decisions about their health and determine their own futures, and when they can participate and contribute in all facets of life, everyone benefits. However, this is not the case in much of the world, including in our own backyards. 

The past 50 years has seen progress for women across a number of indicators. In the U.S, there have been significant increases in women’s participation in the labor force, reductions in the pay gap, and dramatic drops in teenage pregnancies. Globally, there has been substantial, if variable, progress enacting laws and regulations that bolster women’s economic opportunity; 60 million more women are using contraceptives to plan their families today than a decade ago. But this progress has been far too slow to achieve gender equality anytime soon, and advances have been unequal across different racial and ethnic populations. On some indicators, progress had stalled entirely – or even gone backwards. And that was before COVID.

The COVID 19 pandemic exacerbated economic and health inequities that existed long before the pandemic struck and women of color were especially negatively impacted.  Labor participation by women in the U.S is at a 30 year low as a result of the pandemic. Women have done 29% more childcare per week than men, based on data from 16 countries. It has forced 47 million additional women and girls globally into poverty. All types of violence against women and girls, particularly domestic violence, intensified; many are now calling this the “shadow pandemic” growing amidst the COVID pandemic.

Overlay these setbacks against the summer of 2022, when the United  States Supreme Court overturned Roe vs. Wade and thus ended the constitutionally protected right to abortion, and it’s no wonder that the Battery Powered community chose Women’s Health & Wealth as a topic for our community to address. 

We will explore the theme of Women’s Health & Wealth through the following guiding question:

What does it look like when all women have control and agency over their wellbeing and their future?

We will support predominantly women-led initiatives working in the U.S, Africa, Asia or Latin America to create and/or implement the policies, practices, and social norms that support all women to have control of and agency over their lives and wellbeing.  We use an inclusive definition of “women” which includes transwomen and gender non-conforming individuals, whose rights are critical to achieving gender equity and equality. We also recognize that social identities around gender, race, ability, class, ethnicity, and more intersect, creating compounding experiences of discrimination that create different and often worse outcomes for women.

“We tend to talk about race inequality as separate from inequality based on gender, class, sexuality or immigrant status. What’s often missing is how some people are subject to all of these, and the experience is not just the sum of its parts." – Kimberlé Crenshaw 

We have two thematic areas of focus for this theme, but we recognize these issues are interconnected with other areas like climate change and conflict.

	Health: When women can decide for themselves whether or when to have children, they can plan for the future and begin to control their lives. As such, we will focus on sexual and reproductive health and rights, including gender-based violence, by supporting women’s funds and feminist movements that are pushing for systemic change to achieve comprehensive rights and access.
	Wealth: Women’s equitable participation in the economy benefits everyone. We will focus on women’s economic empowerment by addressing systems level change around key barriers to progress (e.g. gender and race income gap, women’s safety and participation in the labor force, unpaid care) and by supporting women entrepreneurs to have thriving businesses.