Embracing feminism and empowering women is one route to achieving gender equality not only for women in America but everywhere in the world.

One way that women can be empowered is if they are placed as leaders and given decision making roles. For example, there has never been a female as the role of a U.S. president or vice president. The U.S. has come close to having a female elected as president, but one has never actually been elected to the role. Farida Jalalzai is a political scientist at Virginia Tech who studies the role of gender in the political arena. Farida speaks, “The presidency is a really important platform, and who is in that position, sends important signals about… our values.” She has also pointed out that 80 other countries have, or have had, female presidents or prime ministers. As for the U.S. presidency, some people might think that women can’t be president because they are not as responsible as a male president may be. It may also be thought of that women can’t do as much work or as good of work as men can.

Another way that women can be empowered is by giving more job opportunities for women. There are some jobs today that some people think that women might not be able to do. One or two of those jobs may be military or sports positions. A woman may want to sign up for the military. The woman is allowed to sign up for the military today if she wants, but there are some people in the world who may think that women in the military will lead to a loss because they may think that women can’t do as good of a job at fighting as men could. With sports positions, women could still take a role there. Similar reasoning is used for sports positions as military positions as to why women shouldn’t be in that role. People may think that a woman can’t do as good of a job, or they may think that a woman wouldn’t be strong enough to be in that position.

After having read these two ways that women can be empowered, could any of you readers think of different ways? What my main point for writing this article is that it doesn’t matter if you are a male or female, and that you could have any position in your career that you want, whether it be president, vice president, a sports coach or player, or even someone in the military. Females, keep this in mind, don’t limit your choices to only what others think you can do.