10/08/2022
Defining Women Empowerment
by Azalea Beatrix Beischel, Miss Intellectual 6th edition winner
To gain a better understanding, let us first define women empowerment. Women empowerment, according to Google, is the promotion of women's sense of self-worth, their ability to make their own choices, and their right to influence social change for themselves and others.
For decades, women have been denied several rights, have been silenced for expressing their opinions, and are frequently treated as the weaker s*x. Can women truly make history? Can women motivate, promote, and coordinate outstanding decision-making? Let me use one of many empowered women as an example of how women can succeed regardless of their ethnicity, skin color, marital status, language, or other factors that contribute to their distinction.
According to her autobiography, it was Marie Curie’s research and discoveries that led to the radiotherapy treatment available to cancer patients today. Marie Curie was the first woman to be awarded a Nobel Prize and the first person ever to receive two of them - the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1903 and the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1911. Despite her excellency, she struggled to earn recognition and gain some space in Frech scientific world, which is maily dominated by men.
Because she was a woman, she was never elected at the French Academy of Sciences. As the Director of the Physics and Chemistry Laboratory, Marie Curie, assisted by her daughter Irène, strongly encouraged the promotion of women in physics, in France and abroad. Since 1906 and until her death, she hired 45 women, never practicing discriminatory selection among men and women scientists. But even then, the press remained mostly silent and the recognition in her field of work was rather limited. More than 60 years after her death, her remains were transferred to the Pantheon. It is worth noting that to this date, she is still the only woman to be interred in the Pantheon on her personal merit alone.
She have demonstrated not only the capabilities of women in sciences but also the fact that having children and caring for a family was not an obstacle for conducting research and directing important scientific centers.
