AWAS – Arab Women’s Association in Sweden

In 1979 the UN adopted a convention called the Women’s Convention. The Women’s Convention states that gender discrimination is a structural problem deeply rooted in culture, family and people’s attitudes. Leaders around the world are constantly working against harmful cultural views, gender stereotypes and prejudices. The UN works actively against gender equalities in order to allow women to gain access to their human rights on the same terms as men.

Women’s suffrage was first addressed during the French Revolution and became one of the questions when the women’s movement was organized during the first wave of feminism in the 19th century. The first country in the world that applied the women’s vote was New Zealand, 1893, and the last country to establish this was Saudi Arabia in 2015. Sweden introduced women’s suffrage in two stages, in 1919 where voting applied to elections to the second Chamber and in 1921 where a woman was allowed to participate in the second Chamber. The first country in Europe to introduce the women’s vote was Finland in 1906.

In ten years it has gone from zero countries with equal rights between men and women in the world to six, where Sweden together with Belgium, Denmark, France, Latvia and Luxembourg get full points on the World Bank’s equality scale. However, the road to a fully equal world does not happen overnight. The calculated date before women become fully equal in the world is in 2073.

It’s hard to give a straight answer to why xenophobia exists, one of the explanations is prejudice. All people have prejudices, and these are mostly based on ignorance and fear. Prejudices are often directed at people of other ethnicities, religions, cultures or nationalities which creats a feeling of ”us and them” in the society. This is one of the reasons why cultural and educational activities are incredibly important!