Women Empowering Women with Stephenie Foster
By Suolan Jiang on 07/05/2011 @ 04:00 PM
After searching through Stephenie Foster’s website, I was amazed by the different ways she is finding to empower women: a teacher at American University, she has taught courses like Women, Politics and Public Policy and Advocating for Women’s Rights; a trainer, she raises women’s confidence and shares strategy skills with them; a writer, she has authored two manuals for Vital Voices that offer advice for women who run for office. Her wonderful career is based on her 25 years of experience in policy advocacy and her passion in fighting for women’s rights.
In the past, Ms.Foster has worked for individuals like Senator Chris Dodd and Senator Barbara Mikulski, government agencies like United States Department of State and USAID, NGOs like the Vital Voices Global Partnership and the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs (NDI) and others. For her, finding solutions and helping others to help themselves is something she’s both interested in and good at doing. She uses both her intelligence and a sense of justice to assist women on the long journey to equality.
In a couple of weeks, Ms.Foster will travel to Afghanistan to help the women there who are running for office. In that male-dominated society, women struggle to make a difference in politics. Both women candidates and women voters are often faced with election violence. What is worse, the number of women voting is decreasing due to gender discrimination: women voters in some communities need permission from their husbands to leave the house and the accessibility of women’s polling stations is bad. However, women all around the world have different difficulties in making their voices heard. Compared to Afghanistan, which requires at least 25% of women politicians in its parliament by law, the U.S. only has 17% women in its Congress. Although we have made a lot progress, there is still a lot of discrimination.
In Ms.Foster’s perspective, women would better serve the needs of the society and reduce corruption in a political system. Although this argument may raise a lot of opposition, it still doesn’t hurt to try. Ms.Foster feels that it is her obligation to convince governments and religious leaders that it is important to have women on board.
No Limits is lucky to have such a good ally to work with. We will follow up her trip to Afghanistan and are looking forward to her achievements.
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