Despite their orders, she attended classes in secret and blogged about her experience under the regime and her advocacy on BBC. In an interview for the documentary, “Class Dismissed: The Death of Female Education,” by Adam B. Ellick and Irfan Ashraf, Yousafzai expressed her aim to become a doctor but she teared up soon after. Her tears alone spoke a thousand words.

The society we live in makes us believe that everything and anything is possible and, if we work hard, our dreams will become reality. I can’t imagine how empty these words might sound to the children, especially girls, who live in so much fear and don’t even have access to basic needs like education. Watching her cry in the video gave me chills and brought tears to my eyes.

While I am worried about what kind of job I will get after I graduate or how much I will make per year, there are numerous girls like Yousafzai on the other side of the world who are fighting for their basic rights. It amazes me how priorities change from place to place. But then when I pondered deeply over the situation, I realized women in developed countries as well don’t receive equal rights.

Just in the United States, women didn’t have the right to vote until 1947. Almost after fifty years, although women can freely vote in the 21st century, there are other instances where women are still disadvantaged. According to the National Women’s Law Center, for every dollar a man made with a bachelor’s degree in 2011, a woman made only 77 cents. The same source reported that, due to the wage gap, women lose $443,360 in a 40-year period when working full time and have to work twelve more years to make up for the gap. The gap is even bigger for minority women.

These numbers are staggering. This wage gap doesn’t make sense to me at all no matter which angle I look at it from. When a professor is assigning homework or grading an exam, the professor doesn’t rationalize his grading, thinking when the female students go out in the real world they will make less than their male counterparts “so let me be lenient on their grades.” No, this never happens! Women work equally hard to get an A as men do.  Why, then, are women discriminated against when working the same job as their male counterparts?

Yousafzai, fortunately, survived the attack and is currently being treated for her head injury at a specialized hospital in Birmingham, England.  Alarmingly, however, the Taliban has promised to hunt her down.  No words can convey the hatred I feel for such a cowardly act towards a girl who dared to dream a little dream.

Women are still vulnerable one way or another. A milestone has been achieved in the transition from household tasks to finally being able to actually earn bread for the family; but, the odds are still against us.  For some, that’s in the form of the Taliban regime, preventing a basic right to education; but for others, the offenses are “silent,” like with wage inequality. All over the world, though, women bravely take part in the struggle for equality.

The post Seen and Hidden Discrimination against Women appeared first on NextGen Journal.