Knowledge is Power

 [00:00:00] Speaker A: Welcome to the underrepresented in tech podcast, where we talk about issues of underrepresentation and have difficult conversations. Underrepresented in tech is a free database with the goal of helping people find new opportunities in WordPress and tech.

 

Hello, Samah.

 

[00:00:19] Speaker B: Hello, Michelle. How are you?

 

[00:00:21] Speaker A: I’m good. How are you?

 

[00:00:23] Speaker B: I’m good. I’m working from home today.

 

The weather not feeling 100% me, so I’m working from home.

 

[00:00:32] Speaker A: That’s a good thing. And I told you this last week off-screen. I love your new glasses. They look so good.

 

[00:00:38] Speaker B: Thank you.

 

[00:00:39] Speaker A: Thanks a lot.

 

[00:00:40] Speaker B: You’re so sweet. I’m shy.

 

[00:00:44] Speaker A: I have piles. Usually it looks so neat and orderly in here, but my desk broke. Well, the bottom draw, the bottom drawer broke off of it, so everything is out of the desk right now. So that’s why it looks like I live in a hoarder home in the spot right now. Anyway.

 

[00:01:02] Speaker B: Me, the thing behind me is the closet. I’m not going to show you. I need to do some tightening and make it close.

 

[00:01:09] Speaker A: It looks beautiful.

 

Sometimes we don’t know what we will discuss until the day of. Sometimes, we know well in advance. So before we start on today’s topic, I kind of want to tell people what’s coming up because I’m excited about some of the episodes we have coming up. So next week, we are recording with a couple of the other organizers from WordPress Accessibility Day. So Alexander Gounder and Bet Hannon will be here. I’m also an organizer for Accessibility Day, so you had better think of all the questions you want to ask us.

 

And the week after that, we’ll have a woman named Shelby. Sorry, I don’t have her last name in front of me right now, she does a lot of work around underrepresentation, and she’s going to come and talk to us about that. The week after that is WordCamp US. So we will not be recording that week, but we have some other things coming up that we’re still squaring up and getting some guests in the door. But late last night, I messaged you while you were sound asleep, saying, what do you want to talk about today? And true to your amazing research nature, I woke up today to like, what about this? Or this or this or this or this? And I’m like, she’s like, you’re just the best. I love it.

 

[00:02:28] Speaker B: Thank you.

 

[00:02:30] Speaker A: So I did pick one of the things that you had put out there, which is from an article on The Steve Sinnott Foundation, so this is from an organization, a foundation about education in the UK on the importance of educating women and girls. So before I start in, as I was saying, my soapbox of all of the things, why did you pick this article? Why was this one of the things that you put out?

 

[00:03:02] Speaker B: I don’t know. Maybe it is cause of where I’m coming from. It doesn’t matter. In the end, it doesn’t matter because all of us women, I believe we go through different struggles or different obstacles, but we still share a lot with each other. My mother believed in the power of education.

 

She always told us, my sisters and I, that if I have my degree in hand and if I can work and afford to buy things for myself and support myself, no man or no one can control me or the way I live. And that’s true. I believe it.

 

Back home or in many countries, women, depending on men or men, are the family’s breadwinners. And, of course, come, come with it. They have to pay the price. Sometimes, the woman can drop her career, or she cannot go out, or she has to be okay with the abusive husband, visibly, physically, or verbally. So, I believe education is really powerful. And especially if we’re going to talk about the whole globe, we’re not in countries in Africa or Asia, but also especially in the states or in Europe, to know your rights, to know what you want to do, to have the freedom that you want to be whatever you want to be or whatever you want to do. And I just. I feel it’s so powerful knowledge and opening doors for yourself. That’s definitely why when I see it, my eyes sparkle.

 

Yeah, we need to do this one. Also, the article is really impressive. It discusses the importance of women’s and girls’ education for sustainable development. I’m sorry about that.

 

I’m having my first cup of coffee now.

 

[00:05:03] Speaker A: Me too, me too.

 

[00:05:05] Speaker B: And how it can benefit social progress and human rights. And they were talking about 180 million girls enrolled in schools in the last 25 years worldwide. Educating girls leads to numerous benefits, including higher earnings, better family planning, improved maternal and child health, and also building a better community and better future for everyone.

 

And also they talk about. To achieve gender equality in education, governments must ensure inclusive, quality education, address gender stereotypes, improve school infrastructure, and provide free education. In some countries worldwide, they have to pay for school, especially primary and secondary school. And sadly, some people around the world, if you want to choose between sending your girls to school or putting food on the table for your family, you will go for it.

 

I want to choose food. Most of the girls are also talking about the education that is stopping them from a young age, marriage or forced marriage, working under 18 or other things. But I think the most powerful tool that anyone can give her daughter or his daughter is to just let them go to school and encourage them.

 

[00:06:42] Speaker A: Absolutely. Excuse me, I was looking at this article, and they cited surveys carried out by UNESCO, which were staggering numbers. In 2018, 130 million girls in the world were not in school. I’m assuming it’s school-age. Of course, in 2019, 12 million were married at an early age.

 

According to those statistics, 18.5 million girls between the ages of 15 and 19 became pregnant in 2019.

 

Education goes a long way toward changing those numbers, for sure. And, you know, it goes on to, as you said, the access to education.

 

They face obstacles. Poverty, ethnicity, disability, child marriage, early and unwanted pregnancy, gender-based violence.

 

It’s just amazing.

 

Excuse me, you’re the first person I talked to in the morning, so my, I have to, I have to, like, start singing or doing some vocal warm-ups before this, so I don’t have all this frog in my throat type thing. We can do it together.

 

Right? Exactly. My neighbors will be like, what is she singing about?

 

But, you know, we’ve seen people like Malala.

 

I can’t pronounce her last name. Can you pronounce it? You probably can.

 

Usafsi. I can’t pronounce it. I apologize for this.

 

[00:08:16] Speaker B: No, I remember because she’s back.

 

[00:08:19] Speaker A: I don’t have it before me. I don’t have it in front of me. So I’m trying to remember it. But she, you know, she was, she is somebody who is a staunch supporter, having been violently assaulted with a, you know, she was shot in the head trying to get an education. Now, she is very outspoken about educating women and girls in every society, but specifically where she comes from. And so, and all of the surrounding areas, of course, there are. And we look at countries like the United States and countries like the UK and, you know, what we consider, you know, we used to say first-world problems. Right. But the truth is that in countries like the United States, we still don’t value women’s education in the same way that we should. Right. And so you don’t have to be from a developing nation.

 

You don’t have to be from an impoverished nation for this disparity between women’s education and women’s ability to attain a job and men’s education and men’s ability to obtain a job. Yes, absolutely. In some countries where there is religious rule or extreme. I mean, it is going to differ around the world. I’m not saying that the United States is just as bad as other places. Please don’t read that into what I’m saying. What I am saying, though, is it still exists. Maybe to a lesser extent, but it still exists. I had mentioned on this podcast before that in 1987, which was not that long ago, people, I promise my school guidance counselor, who herself had to have been college and probably master’s degree educated, told me who was a student, right? So I had a 3.7 GPA in high school, and I was. I graduated 21st in my class of over 320. People told me I shouldn’t go to college. I should focus on finding a husband and raising a family. And I mean, and yes, I hope we don’t tell our children that anywhere in the world, right? That you don’t need an education. But for her to tell me that in the great United States of America in 1987 was practically criminal. Thankfully, I didn’t take her advice at all.

 

I am educated. I do have several degrees. And not that having a piece of paper makes you an educated person; I want to state that as well. I know many people who are smarter than me and have so much more knowledge than I do, even those who never went to college. So I’m not saying college is the be-all, end-all. But I did go on to do those things that afforded me places in life that allowed me to be where I am today.

 

Even though my college degrees aren’t required for what I do today, they certainly have helped me understand the world and know to educate my daughter beyond, you know, the things that people would say, oh, she doesn’t need it. It just hurts. It hurts to see women being oppressed because they don’t have access. It’s one thing for a woman to decide for herself if she wants to be a stay-at-home mom or if she wants to work someplace where there is no requirement for further education or to take herself out of the running.

 

I always want to empower women to make the choices that they want to make. But when our children are making choices to get pregnant and to think that that’s their ticket to a future, instead of encouraging them to stay in school, encouraging them to get educated, encouraging them to find careers, because you can have it all, despite what they would tell us growing up, that you can’t be a mother and have a career. I was a single mom, I had a career, and I had a very well-adjusted child. Right? So she is somebody who is an amazing person, an amazing human in this world, who feels even more deeply than I do about the issues. And so you can, if you work hard enough, do everything you want to do. So, telling women that they can’t all those years is such a fallacy and such a way to keep us from having those roles that men just wanted to keep for themselves.

 

That’s how I believe about it anyway.

 

[00:12:47] Speaker B: I agree with you. At the same, a lot of people that they are there.

 

It’s also funny because I sent you another article which we don’t want to talk about. Like, people are scared of women getting educated or they’re choosing their careers. Now, people are scared that women will not give birth to children, but this is my choice in life. If I want to have kids, if I don’t want to have kids, if I want to stay home, or if I want to go to work and build a career, that absolutely should be the woman’s decision and no one else’s But it’s my right to go to school. It’s my right to get educated.

 

And that is the issue because some people don’t see it. As you said, then, like, with all respect for the teacher, we’re not going to say bad words. We cannot say about her. The one she told you, get married and then have the kids. That is the thing because I will talk from a different angle. If you ask a woman to go after high school to go for further education, get married, and have kids, life is forced. Majeures. I believe that something can happen if her husband passes away or if she gets divorced. She ended up with one or two kids. She cannot afford to buy anything for them. She has to do one or two jobs to be able to feed them.

 

We can do better. We can educate everyone that in the end, if you want to get married, just stay at home, fully respect. If you want to go to school, do that. But still, in 2024, many women won’t have access to education.

 

And I know we said we’re not going to bring politics, but I was reading the other day’s news, and it’s disturbed me: Afghanistan. Now, I don’t know if somebody who followed the news, the Taliban, is taking back the country and Afghanistan. In the seventies, women were wearing skirts and going to university, and now, women are forbidden to read and write.

 

And that is not the case in any religion on this earth. You cannot forbid. They are forbidden to read and write so they can control them more. Say then, so if he can read something and he told her like he’s reading in a joke, he will tell her, this is God saying, you do whatever she will say, of course, I believe you because she doesn’t know how to read and write. And still, the numbers that you were saying earlier, the huge numbers, it is not, we’re talking one or two or 3 million. It’s like 180 million people surround the world. That is a really big number. And there are a lot of organizations doing great worldwide to do so, too. I know UNICEF gives kids notebooks or backpacks or provides them with teachers. I know enough power for UN Women. They are supporting women with projects. They’re funding their projects to do some work because how much we you living in the States? I live in the Netherlands, in Europe, and in the countries where we live. There’s still a lot to improve in our lives. It’s beautiful. But we cannot disconnect ourselves from the real world because I believe that we are connecting WordPress, and we still connect in the real world. Yeah. Not only education about teaching, but it’s also about educating yourself about many things happening in life. 

 

[00:16:15] Speaker A: You said it was okay for me to bring a little politics in. So I will say we’re in the throes of political campaigns, and our new president will be chosen this year. And the vice presidential nominee on the republican side commented in a speech a few years back, and it’s still not backing down from it this year. He’s been asked several times if he regrets saying it, and he will not say he regrets saying it, but he says that people who are child-free, or, he says, childless, right.

 

Have no right in their mind to help plan the future of our nation because they don’t have a physical tie to the future of our nation.

 

I obviously could not disagree more. That is, to me, to put somebody in any kind of power that says, well, if you’re choosing to be childless or for whatever circumstances you are childless, you should not have a vote in what happens in the future of our country because you don’t have a stake in that future. Now, my daughter and her husband have no children. They are in their thirties. And she, let’s hope, has a very long life and lives to be 100 years old. So she is still 70 years old.

 

She should have no right to speak on what happens in our government because 150 years from now, she won’t have a prodigy still walking the earth. That is ludicrous. I’m 50. I’ll be 56 soon.

 

I can’t say 55 for very much longer. I’m 55, and let’s hope I have at least 30 or 40 years left in me. I should have no vote because I don’t have any children living at home, like I’m a childless cat lady, as he called us. I have cats, it’s true. But that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t have a say in what happens in my nation because I’m no longer bringing children into the world. And so I just. It just boggles the mind how people can still seek to oppress women. I felt like we reached a pinnacle in the nineties and the early 2000s, at least here, where it felt like women were coming closer to achieving equality. Like, we’re still not there. Right. But in the last eight years, it feels like all we’ve done is step backward. A lot of that is because of the way that politics plays a role in how we educate women and children in our nations. And so I don’t care if you’re in the United States. If you are in Haiti, which the writer of that article is from Haiti, if you are in an African country, if you’re in an Asian country, or a European country, it doesn’t matter if you are not educating your children to understand that they have rights to their selves and that their voice is important in how their local government and their, you know, the government, the greater government has run. We are doing everybody a disservice.

 

It just feels so dystopian at this point. And it’s hard to have hope when those are the kinds of messages that you’re seeing on a regular basis. And, yes, I’m seeing them much more right now because we have an election in November. But we have to have hope, and we have to look forward to a future where we educate women, and we educate girls, and we educate men and boys also to appreciate equality and to understand that they are not dominant and that they are not, that women are not subservient to them and that women should have a right to be the CEO or the CTO or the director of and all of those positions that we are fully equipped to run, that we shouldn’t only get those roles if a man doesn’t want them. And that’s how it’s felt a lot, you know, throughout history, is that only if there’s nobody else will we hire a woman to fill that role.

 

I took a role back in; oh, gosh, it was 90’s. I took a role as the registrar of a business school, and that’s where I got my MBA here at the University of Rochester in New York.

 

I negotiated a salary. Now, I don’t even want to tell you how much it was because back in ’98, the salary was a lot less than it is today, right? The equivalent of today. But anyway, I negotiated a salary that I was very happy with then, and I took the role, and of course, you know, I’ve got this big desk, and I’m corner office. I was so happy. And I’m going through the files and figuring out what I keep. What do I need? How can I learn? I also found some pay stubs for the person who had the position before me, and it was a man. He had had the position before me. Of course, I looked at them. How are you not going to look at them? I would love them there. For me, he made less money leaving that role than I made coming into that role. And I felt like that was so cool that they valued me, my education, and what they thought that I could contribute, that I was. I successfully negotiated a higher salary than the incumbent person in that office, who had been a man. And for me, it just like all of those bring home the bacon and I’m a woman, and all of those songs, like the women’s anthem, so to speak, just kind of empowered me. And that’s what I have always tried to do for my daughter. And I wish that I had the ability to empower all the girls everywhere to have those thoughts for themselves and to want to do better for themselves and their future generations.

 

[00:22:18] Speaker B: I agree with you. Like, it’s. So. How can I say? If I look at myself and many girls from my high school, I believe I have reached the stars. I always said when I was a little girl, I’m gonna work in a different country, I’m gonna travel the world, I’m gonna go live in this and this and this. And my mom was like, I hope that. And I did it. I believe I’m really happy in my life. When I was looking at this little girl refugee in one country, and she’s. And all of the girls at 80, they’re really obsessive getting married me, I was like I was taking two schools after. So I need to study, I need to do something. I want to do something for myself.

 

At the same time, I don’t mean to brag when I look at my big house. I work, and I pay for it equally 50- 50 with my husband. Of course, my husband gets paid five times more than me for what he’s doing in the world. But I don’t accept it. I pay 50- 50 like this is my share because this is my house.

 

Also, when we talk about education, we should educate women in everything.

 

October is going to be breast cancer month, and at your start of work, when we have this empowered women group, we’re going to educate all of our female colleagues who identify themselves as females and other colleagues about it. This knowledge is also about how to protect your health. To know what my health is, how can I do it? It’s one of the nasty diseases, no cure for it. Women go through horrible treatment with it, losing their hair, having a lot of surgery, losing their breasts, and a lot of health insurance. Not all health insurance covers the surgery afterward. And that has given you a lot of mental health issues, a lot of impact in their life. And to educate women on how to prevent this, something simple, I’m not going to say let all of us be science, let all of us be doctors, engineers. No, but that’s something small. How can women be educated about their bodies and self and how to prevent it? That is itself empowering women. At the same time, many women in Europe and the Netherlands don’t know how to do a self-test or, oh, when, which year they should go to do the test. How much liberation would there be in Europe? The test is here 50 years for women, 50 years old and above, because they are genetically women. But I’m coming from a country where women can get it in their thirties.

I wish I could take my genes from home to here, but I can’t; it’s not possible yet; I cannot transfer them. So education is really important. At the same time, a lot of organizations are doing awesome. I know a lot of women in WordPress. Aida, you know her, is teaching women how to use WordPress and build websites. There’s a lady from the Ugandan WordPress community. Sharon also helped educate women and kids about learning WordPress, and that is powerful. And I know we are talking about it, and I hope in the future, a lot of women teach women because I don’t like to wait for men to give it to us. We should help each other.

 

[00:25:53] Speaker A: Yeah. Absolutely.

 

Yeah. I think there’s. We could talk about this forever. There are so many studies on gender; women’s studies exist because of the history of under-educating women and the under-empowerment of women in some cases. That’s a very big understatement, but yeah. And I don’t know, in the UK, I’m sorry, in Europe and other parts of the world. Still, here we have something called equal payday in the United States, and that is the distance into the next year that a woman has to work to equal the pay of a man in the same position the previous year. So, for example, I don’t know, Job X. A man worked all of 2023, and he earned x number of dollars. A woman in the same job as X had to work into March of the next year to earn that same amount of money. And that’s what equal payday is, the salary gap. Yeah, yeah. It also changes based on ethnicity. So, women who are.

 

I think it’s Hispanic women or native american women that almost have to work two full years, like, all the way into October, November of the next year, to earn the same money that a man was making the previous year. So they are almost 50% of a man’s salary for the same job. So it’s not just women. It’s disproportionate, depending on the ethnicity of the women as well. And then if you add, you know, disabilities into that, it also is worse. So, yeah, we get it. We get the raw end of the stick a lot of the time.

 

[00:27:37] Speaker B: No, the salary gap in Europe. So crazy. And there is a large salary gap. I’m really happy at Yoast. They have this policy all of us are equal. It doesn’t matter if you’re a man or a woman if you’re Dutch or non-Dutch. All of us get it. If you’re doing the same job you’re doing, you’re getting the same pay. Maybe the difference is the years of experience, or you have degrees for it or something, but all of us, I’m really happy to work. But here, it’s normal for men to get paid more than women. The only countries, I think, in Europe are the Scandinavian countries, which have equal pay. I found it really ridiculous. Also, something sad really pissed me off. I was learning about Dutch culture. I love Dutch culture. I love Dutch people. But 20 years ago, if you were working in a bank and you got pregnant and gave birth, you would be fired because your brain could not work as a normal person because you were busy with yours. Yeah, it is really crazy.

 

[00:28:41] Speaker A: It is crazy.

 

[00:28:42] Speaker B: I know a lot of Dutch people. None of them were that kind of mind. But I don’t know who was in the government who decided this one. This one can give you a good rule. Let’s make it no. Yeah.

 

[00:28:53] Speaker A: Two weeks. I think it was two weeks ago. Somewhere in the last month was in the United States. It was the 50- 40 years. I’m not gonna remember now, 40, 45-year anniversary of women being able to open their own bank accounts and have a credit card. It was in the seventies in the United States that women were finally able to have their own, like, having a credit card or having a bank account without a man’s name on it as well. And I texted my daughter that. I’m like, I cannot believe that was in my lifetime. Blah, blah, blah. She sent me back a picture of a woman. Let me. Let me find it and read it to you. She sent me back a picture of a woman. She said.

 

I said 50 years ago, women got the right to apply for a credit card without a man’s signature. I’ll be 56 in October. That’s within my lifetime. Crazy. And she says, wait, it’s so funny you say that. I said, why? So she said it was because I just celebrated my good colleague and friend’s retirement anniversary at the bank. And she said, the week she started, that law came into effect. And then she sent me a picture of this beautiful woman with her. Beautiful black woman. My daughter’s a black woman. And so to see the two of them beaming at this picture was really beautiful, celebrating their accomplishments. But, yeah, she’s like, wait, I can’t believe you just said that because she just said that, too.

 

[00:30:08] Speaker B: So crazy. Those people think, like, if you’re a woman and your father passed away and you don’t have a brother and you don’t have an ankle or whatever, and what you will do, like, you’ll begin the street. You don’t. What do you do? Just hold the money in your bags or in your socks and your drawers, you hide them. I don’t know.

 

[00:30:25] Speaker A: It’s insane. Insane. Sometimes I’ll talk about when I used to work as a volunteer at the Susan B. Anthony House here in Rochester.

 

She was famous in the United States as one of the people who gave women the right to vote. So sometimes we’ll talk about that and some of the things I learned about women’s rights within the United States. But this is not a podcast about the US. But that’s my lived experience and so that’s my point of reference. But yeah, we could chat about that sometime. That was, it’s amazing how little you know how to. And part of. Okay, so let’s take this back to educating women.

 

If women today aren’t educated about our own women’s history, we assume that we’ve always had these rights, right? So, it would not have occurred to my daughter that in her mother’s lifetime, I would not have been able to get a credit cardinal. Right. And do those kinds of things. But we educate people to understand the history. Isn’t that long ago that things were bad, right, or not as good. And we think the civil rights movement in the United States was in the sixties, fifties, and sixties, right? I mean, and we’re still struggling, of course, but that’s when, you know, people were marching and people, and there were so many deaths and just, oh yeah, it’s not over. I know, but the civil rights movement began with Martin Luther King Jr and all of that. And so that’s not that long ago, but anything that happens before your consciousness feels like a million years ago. Right. And so we need to continue to educate people so they understand that the rights they have today didn’t exist in their parents’ lifetime in many ways. And so understanding that I think knowledge is power so that we make sure that we don’t have to turn the clocks back. Anyway, yeah, I am; I wasn’t gonna get on my soapbox, but there it is. I’m on my soapbox every week.

 

That’s why we have this podcast. Right? So, bring up the hard points.

 

Anyway, I don’t know what the takeaway is. Educate women. Fight for the education of women and girls.

 

[00:32:35] Speaker B: Educational is powerful in any aspect of life. If it’s about learning a new skill, learning your rights, or learning your history as a woman, you can know the history of other women, other countries, or even how to protect yourself from future diseases. But knowledge is powerful in any aspect.

 

[00:32:53] Speaker A: Yeah, that’s the title of this episode. Knowledge is power, I think.

 

[00:32:58] Speaker B: Yeah, we also came up with the title.

 

[00:33:00] Speaker A: I love it, I love it.

 

[00:33:02] Speaker B: We’re predictive.

 

[00:33:04] Speaker A: Thanks for bringing up, doing good research, and bringing up good topics for us. And I really appreciate that.

 

As we said, next week, we’re going to talk to Alexander and bet about WordPress accessibility day. Accessibility is more than disability, right? Of course, the primary reason we have accessibility on the web is for people with disabilities to have access. But there are. I love this. I love the fact that accommodating people with disabilities is also tied to your SEO, which is your wheelhouse.

 

And so I think that it’s like, even if you hate disabled people, do it for the SEO, right?

 

But let’s do it for more than that. So next week we’re going to talk about WP accessibility today, why it exists, and why accessibility is important, and then we’ll go from there. So if you have questions in advance of that topic, or if you have questions about today’s, hit us up, either publicly or privately, on our socials, or you can go right to our website and fill out a form there.

 

Thanks for hanging in there with us and listening to our thoughts on some pretty important matters. So thank you, Sima. I appreciate you.

 

[00:34:19] Speaker B: Yeah, thank you, Michelle. Thanks, everyone for listening. And, yeah, see you next week.

 

[00:34:24] Speaker A: Alright, bye-bye. Bye.

 

If you’re interested in using our database, joining us as a guest for an episode, or just saying hi, go to underrepresentedintech.com. See you next week.