Has the pandemic impacted female education?

Injustice, inequality and some more.

I’ll start with some shocking statistics. UNESCO predicts that because of the disruptions caused by the pandemic, 11 million girls might not return to school.

The injustice of the past

Women’s education has been a grave issue since the dawn of civilization. Just a few centuries ago, it was considered that an educated woman is ‘dangerous’ to the society and is a sure shot way to ‘corrupt’ it and ‘break up’ the family with her ‘indecorous’ ideas. Schools and colleges devoted to women’s education used to be non-existent. A literate female was a rarity who was frowned upon. She faced the wrath of society and had to fight to attain something that we consider natural today — education.

Insufficient progress

There has been a significant improvement in today’s era in which a majority of the female population all over the world is educated. But this is not enough. Over two-thirds of the world’s illiterate population is female. On a regional note, third world countries’ women fare the worst. Well developed western countries like U.K and U.S.A have a higher female literacy rate, while for the lesser developed countries like Bangladesh and India, it is abysmally low. A number of factors like poverty, sexism and the narrowness of the outlook of society are responsible for this.

A catalyst to the problem

This disparity has increased further because of the pandemic of inequality — COVID-19. While the economy has taken the greatest hit, the suffering of the education system is not far behind. Because everything has shifted to the ‘online’ mode, classroom education and its undoubted benefits have disappeared. This has affected females more than it has affected males. Even the rare rural female that was ‘allowed’ to go to school in the pre-covid era is now stranded at home because of lack of internet and gadget access, which in many cases might not be a limitation for a male of the same background. This gap between the males and females, the have and have-nots has increased, and even spread, possibly as widely and fatally as the virus itself.

The fight for almost half the population is not just against the disease of the body, but against the disease of the mind as well.