Gender inequality is not only unjust for women, it’s bad for everyone. And it’s bad for the planet. Studies show that investing in women’s education and opportunities improves families and societies, and that greater input from women leads to better, more informed decisions within families, communities, and institutions.

We agree with renowned author and leader in partnership studies, Riane Eisler, that equality starts in the home. According to Eisler, the key to creating a society based in greater partnership and collaboration can be as simple as parents modeling partnership to their children. One concrete way that men can model better partnership and contribute to greater equality is to do more unpaid care and domestic work in the house. According to the International Labour Organization, in recent years the amount of time spent by men each day doing unpaid care and domestic work has increased by only 8 minutes. At this pace, it will take over 200 years to achieve parity. We can do better than this!

At Haiti Partners we are committed to gender equality. Each week we conduct continuing education programming in gender equality and ending violence against women and girls for our staff, teachers, parents and hundreds of community members. It’s all about partnership and it starts in our homes.

Women around the world, we honor and celebrate you.

Gratefully,

John and Merline Engle for Haiti Partners