Women see more, feel more and do more

A little baby Neela is born in a busy hospital in Ireland.
She will turn into a beautiful grown- up woman some 20 years later.
What will her life be like?

Will she find her way through the highs and lows of a modern world, where women have equal rights and where they are treated equally?
Oh, but are they really?

An adult Neela will more likely get fewer and less important tasks than her male colleagues at work.
She is in the 44% risk group to be harassed and bullied in her workplace.
If she chooses to be a mother she will struggle with life balance due to a lack of support around childcare or flexibility of employment.

Undoubtedly, she will be exposed to violent, aggressive, sexual and unwanted messages and remarks about her on social media and in real life.
Her professionalism will be judged based on her outfit choices and if she picks up a career in medicine and becomes a surgeon, she will forever be addressed as Doctor Neela because there is no equivalent of Mr, commonly used for a senior, male surgeon in Ireland.

And all this will come just after she had survived her teenage and adolescent years of exposure to social media and click based virtual influencers’ standards of what her body, her style and her life should look like.
Everywhere she'll go and turn Neela will be bombarded with images of filtered faces, promises of injectable happiness and a fake link between the length of her eyelashes and finding the love of her life.

Did anyone mean or plan it that way for Neela?
Her mother? The midwife that assisted her birth, her teachers in primary school (most likely all women) and these concerned and loving male figures in her life, did any of them want that?
No, of course they did not.

It's just how the world spins right now and things that got out of control and the hell that broke loose.
It’s just that, for many women, the lived experience of equality still has a vast space for improvement.
It’s just that it is a hard thing to reconcile with what the world should be like with what the world actually is.
But even knowing it all, and having gone through it myself, I will consider myself lucky, because not even once did I think: I wish I wasn't a woman.

Women see more, feel more and do more.
There is no greater power than women having each other's backs.
My dear fellow women, I'm wishing you love, strength and happiness today and forever.
And dear Neela, I'm rooting for you.