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It’s not a matter of “if” you’ll be hacked, but “when” you’ll be hacked. That may be every security expert’s favorite quote, and unfortunately they say it’s true. A Wikileaks dump of alleged CIA documents that includes electronic hacking techniques makes it abundantly clear that no one is safe. The leaks and the revealing CIA techniques reinforce the notion that when we’re wired 24-7, we are vulnerable. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
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From: MeNeedIt
Twelve-year-old Janet Sylva of Gambia wants to be a doctor when she grows up, she says with a broad grin — one that surgeons in New York gave back to her after removing from her mouth one of the largest tumors they’d ever seen.
The 6-pound benign tumor was about the size of a cantaloupe. It prevented Janet from eating, and her breathing had become so difficult that doctors were afraid she might die within a year if nothing was done.
“It made her a prisoner in her own body,” said Dr. David Hoffman, a Staten Island surgeon who became aware of Janet’s plight last year after doctors in the neighboring west African nation of Senegal reached out to international health groups for assistance. She had stopped going to school and wore a scarf around her face to hide the massive tumor.
Hoffman coordinated with the Global Medical Relief Fund and a team of volunteer surgeons and other medical staff at Cohen Children’s Medical Center in New Hyde Park on Long Island to arrange for Janet to have the surgery, which was performed for free in January.
Dr. Armen Kasabian, chief of plastic surgery at North Shore University Hospital, led the team in performing the delicate operation, which not only involved removing the tumor but also rebuilding her jaw by using part of a bone from her leg. Kasabian said the team knew they had to get it right the first time because Janet and her mother, Philomena, would only be in the U.S. for a short time.
“We don’t have the luxury of operating on her 10 times,” he said. “We have to try and get the most that we can out of just one operation.”
He and Hoffman said they employed 3-D imaging to build models of the child’s mouth, including the tumor, and were able to use the virtual modeling techniques to practice for the procedure before the actual 12-hour surgery took place January 16.
Both physicians said the tumor wouldn’t have grown so large if Janet had lived in the U.S.
“It would never get to this,” Kasabian said. “This grew over the course of three years, and she had no one to take care of it there. Here, it would have been treated when it was smaller and more manageable.”
Janet and her mother are preparing to return to Gambia next week, said Elissa Montanti of the Global Medical Relief Fund, the Staten-Island based charity that arranged for transportation, housing and travel visas for Janet and her mother.
Before heading home, the pair returned Thursday to Cohen Children’s hospital.
Through an interpreter speaking their native language of Wolof, the mother and daughter shyly thanked the medical staff.
“I’m very happy and grateful because I have my daughter back,” Philomena Sylva said.
Janet smiled and said the scarf she had worn to hide her face has been thrown away.
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From: MeNeedIt
Nigerian Abdulhakim Mohammed has just graduated in architecture but, like many people ranging from unemployed locals to foreign investors and Africa’s richest man, he has decided the future lies in rice farming.
The reason is that domestic rice prices have more than doubled in the last two years due to an import ban and a dive in the Nigerian currency. At the same time, the government is subsidizing tractors, mills and fertilizers as well as arranging cheaper loans to boost production – with considerable success.
And yet the drive to cut an annual food import bill of $20 billion has run into the kind of problems that have long bedeviled Nigeria’s efforts to build up an economy outside its dominant the oil industry.
Despite rice growing being a government priority, many farmers still work with their bare hands in fields lacking irrigation channels. Mills are often ramshackle while poor roads make getting the crop from the main growing areas in northern Nigeria to consumers in the south difficult and costly.
As a result, the industry has so far failed to fill a supply shortfall amounting to about 3 million tonnes of milled rice created by the import ban. In the commercial capital of Lagos, supermarkets mainly sell rice from India or Thailand.
Mohammed took up growing rice three years ago to help fund his university studies in the northern state of Bauchi. When he finished last year, he opted for a career in the fields around the town of Gadau, rather than in architecture.
“My advice to the youth is to join rice farming,” said Mohammed, who is expanding his own area from 1.5 to 2 hectares (3.7 to 5 acres) as well as working as a supervisor on a new farm that workers are preparing nearby.
“One bag of rice sells for 10,000 to 11,000 (naira). Two years ago I was selling for 4,500,” he told Reuters.
That makes a bag worth almost $25 at the exchange rate on the black market, where many Nigerians go due to restrictions and dollar shortages in the official banking system. In Bauchi state, hundreds of farmers are busy expanding, preparing new fields and drilling water holes for irrigation.
Farms have been opening across much of the country, lifting output of unmilled rice to 7.85 million tons in 2016 – a 17.4 percent jump from 2014, the National Bureau of Statistics told Reuters. That compares with just 4.54 million in 2010, before the campaign began.
Talking vs Implementing
Until 2015, Nigeria imported up to 4 million tons of rice annually, much of which was smuggled from the western neighbor Benin Republic. But this has fallen to about 700,000 tons as authorities now monitor the border, industry players say.
That lifted prices for the staple, along with currency curbs imposed to prop up the naira which has been hit by a fall in revenues from Nigeria’s oil exports.
Part of the rise is because farmers are passing on higher costs, saying the government subsidies are not enough. Importers have to pay a premium of 30 percent over the official rate to get dollars on the black market for buying the foreign-made machinery and fertilizers that growers need.
On top of this, farmers complain that endemic corruption means the government help doesn’t always reach the right people.
“Some people who got fertilizers were not even farmers. They sell it then,” said Mohammed Tafida, the local head of a rice farmers’ association, who is also expanding his own fields.
“Fertilizers are very expensive,” he told Reuters, standing by a new paddy field being prepared. “Our production costs are very high. You now pay workers 500 to 700 naira a day; before it was 200 naira.”
President Muhammadu Buhari has made fighting graft a priority since coming to power two years ago. But he has to work with Nigeria’s 36 states where officials executing the federal programs often help out supporters or relatives.
Farmers and food producers can get subsidized loans well below the benchmark interest rate of 14 percent. But one processor of garri – another local staple, made from cassava – said he had waited six months to get his loan approved as banks are new to the farming business.
“In Nigeria talking is one thing and implementing plans another,” said Idris Salihu, another rice farmer in Bauchi. “We need more support.”
Pot-holed roads
The rice boom has also drawn large scale investment from Africa’s richest man, Nigerian Aliko Dangote, and foreign firms to supply the huge market of 190 million people.
Dangote Group said last month it planned to launch a rice mill with a farm scheme which will produce 225,000 tons of parboiled, milled rice by the year-end.
Wacot Rice, part of Lagos-based food and farming conglomerate TGI, will open a rice mill next month with a capacity of 100,000 tons annually. It works with rice farmers on 15,000 hectares and plans to expand to 165,000 hectares within 10 years.
Abroad, Singapore-based Olam plans to increase its Nigerian rice farming to 6,000 hectares from 4,300 hectares “in a couple of years or so”, a spokesman said.
Nigeria hopes such large-scale investors will improve rice yields, measuring output per hectare. These are among the lowest in Africa as the market is dominated by relatively inefficient farmers running fields of two to five hectares.
The lack of good roads also means that rice from the north hardly reaches Lagos, Nigeria’s biggest city. The government plans to increase capital spending by nearly a quarter in 2017 to fix pot-holed routes and help trade. However, a collapse in oil revenues due to low world prices has slowed many projects.
Nigerian growers also struggle to meet quality standards set by foreign agri-businesses, with consumers complaining about having to extract grit from the rice.
“I like better the taste of the local rice. The only problem is the stones in it,” said Samuel Ativ, 38, as he shopped in the busy Bauchi market. “If I am in hurry I prefer the foreign rice because there are no stones.”
Nigeria has imported 110 mills which remove grit in the process but most farmers still go to villagers to handle their rice with home-made machines.
Larger investors hope Nigeria will not repeat the mistakes of the past by losing interest in domestic food production if and when global oil prices pick up again, helping the naira to recover and making imports cheaper.
“Important is that they started the journey to become food self-sufficient,” said Rahul Savara, TGI Group Managing Director. “They are going on the right track, and the government has to continue the same policies it is doing now.”
From: MeNeedIt
Iran’s supreme leader criticized the country’s slow pace of economic recovery on Thursday despite the lifting of sanctions and called on President Hassan
Rouhani’s government to champion greater self-sufficiency, state TV reported.
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s criticism comes ahead of Iran’s presidential election in May, when the pragmatist president is expected to seek re-election.
“Of course the government has taken remarkable steps but if the resistance economy had been implemented fully and widely, we could witness a tangible difference in people’s lives,” state TV reported Khamenei as saying.
The “resistance economy” promoted by Khamenei is aimed at making Iran’ economy more self-sufficient.
Rouhani’s popularity and his efforts to end Iran’s economic and political isolation have panicked hardline allies of Khamenei, who fear losing power and aim to reclaim the presidency for their faction.
Most sanctions imposed on Iran over its disputed nuclear program were lifted in 2016, in exchange for Iran curbing its nuclear work under a deal with six major powers in 2015.
Khamenei and his allies have criticized Rouhani’s government for failure to bolster the economy since the sanctions imposed on Iran were lifted a year ago.
“We receive complaints from people … People should feel improvements regarding creation of jobs and manufacturing. It is not the case now,” he said.
Rouhani and his ministers have defended the government’s record, citing economic reports and figures pointing to improvements.
“Presenting reports and figures is good but will not impact people’s lives in mid and long-term,” Khamenei said.
Hit hard by the double hammer blows of years of embargo and the plunge in oil prices since the middle of 2014, Iran’s economy has slowly recovered since the lifting of sanctions but deals with Western investors are few and far between.
Foreign investors are cautious about trading with or investing in Iran, fearing penalties from remaining unilateral U.S. sanctions and U.S. President Donald Trump’s tough approach to the Islamic Republic.
“Attracting foreign investment is a positive measure but so far a very limited of foreign contracts have been materialized,” Khamenei said. Iran needs foreign capital to modernize its key oil and gas sectors.
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From: MeNeedIt
Since January of this year, thousands of school children in India’s northeastern state of Assam have pored over an illustrated story of how two young girls from a relief camp were lured by a man who told them of the good life they could lead in a big city, home to swanky buildings and flashy cars. It sounded attractive to the poor youngsters who could only visualize a bleak life ahead.
Fortunately spotted by a policeman as they waited for the man at a railway station to head to the city, the story goes on to relate what their future could have been like when they were sold to work as poorly paid domestic employees, sex workers or laborers.
The comic in the Assamese language aims to raise awareness among children about trafficking rings that lure young girls and boys from villages into India’s booming cities with the promise of good jobs.
The most vulnerable to human traffickers are states such as Assam, where a violent ethnic conflict has displaced many families, and the country’s poorer, underdeveloped states such as West Bengal, Telengana, and Andhra Pradesh.
As child rights campaigners stress prevention as key to addressing the problem, comic books have emerged as an effective tool to empower children to protect themselves in these areas. Children being sold accounted for nearly half of the human trafficking cases in India in 2015.
“There are more colors, more expressions, its an effective means of communication, especially for children,” says Miguel Queah at Assam-based non-profit Utsah, who wrote the story and helps organize reading sessions in vulnerable and displaced communities such as relief camps, children’s homes and government schools in Assam. “Children love reading the stories, discussing among their friends, we could see that response taking place” he says.
Orders to print more comics have gone out with the initial stock of 800 copies having run out and there is a proposal to incorporate it in school curriculums.
The non-profit My Choices Foundation began reaching out to rural communities a little over a year ago with its comic book, The Light of Safe Villages to educate children about threats such as trafficking and other social problems such as child marriage.
Hannah Norling who heads communications at the My Choices Foundation is confident that the colorful books and simple stories in local languages are effectively spreading the message of how traffickers trap young children. “We are in the right place,” she said.
It is distributed to students across more than 500 Indian villages.
She points out that while it is sometimes difficult to reach out to parents, who are busy working, children are more of a captive audience and the idea was to give them an illustrated book that could serve as a complete educational tool which they could share with their parents.
“We had to leave something behind that would be a long term reminder. If something happens a year from now, a physical frame of reference for them to revert back to ‘OK now what do I do?” said Norling.
One of the stories in the comic is of a guardian girl on a mission to save others and another of a vigilant boy.
Growing awareness among children has made them more alert to threats from traffickers and some have reported to village council or others if they noticed a friend missing, according to Norling. She said that helped in the rescue of three girls in the past year who had left their village.
The comic book initiative is among several efforts to prevent trafficking in rural areas. One of them by Save the Children spreads the message in local communities through children who have been rescued.
India honored a woman on Wednesday when 21-year-old Anoyara Khatun, who was trafficked from West Bengal state, received the “Women Power” award from the president for stopping hundreds of other children from being forced into labor or married off.
Khatun was brought to Delhi when she was 12 years old and forced to work as a house maid, but managed to escape after six months. With the help of child rights advocates, she returned home and is part of a network of children’s groups in 80 villages where young people are taught about their rights.
Manab Ray at Save the Children in New Delhi points out that once trafficking has happened, there is little that can be done to help the victims, so the key is to stop it in villages. And at the heart of the effort to engage local communities are the children themselves. “Children we found are the best informers, in terms of knowing the issues, because they face it themselves, they can have the natural ability of identifying the traffickers and all,” said Ray.
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From: MeNeedIt
Before leaving her home each day to teach art to children, Mariluce Maria de Souza must factor in extra time to account for the shootings and other eruptions of violence that occur daily in Alemao, Rio de Janeiro’s largest complex of slums, or favelas.
The 35-year-old mother sometimes has to cancel a session teaching painting to children because the journey to class is just too dangerous. Through the project called Favela Art, the self-taught artist requires that her students attend school and study hard in return.
Souza has become an example of empowerment for girls and women in the slum, who often face domestic violence and workplace discrimination.
“Sometimes the mothers, who are mother and father at the same time, don’t have the time to give the kind of attention that five, six or seven children need,” Souza said.
Like many Latin American countries, Brazil has deep problems with gender-specific violence. The Brazilian nonprofit Mapa da Violencia says nearly five in 100,000 women are killed each year, giving the country one of the world’s highest homicide rates for women.
The situation is even worse for black women, many of whom live in slums. Between 2003 and 2013, the annual number homicides of black women jumped 54 percent, according to Mapa da Violencia.
“We use the graffiti to demand the end of violence against women,” said Maiara Viana Rodrigues, a 25-year-old who said that as a teen she was sexually abused by a man in her neighborhood.
To make her point, the member of Afrograffitteiras, a group working to empower black women, on one recent afternoon painted graffiti exhorting: “Viva! You, Woman!” on a wall in a Rio suburb.
Along with rejecting physical violence, the female artists say they also want to shine a light on psychological abuse, unequal access to education and health care, and less pay for women doing the same job as men.
Lya Alves, who recently painted a mural of a black woman on a wall in Rio’s renovated port area, says feminism has lost much of its meaning since the 1970s, when women fought against being considered sexual objects.
“Nowadays the media promotes” the sexual objectification of women, she said. “Is that helping to obtain a better education, a better salary?”
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From: MeNeedIt
Ancient DNA from dental plaque is revealing intriguing new information about Neanderthals, including specific menu items in their diet such as woolly rhinoceros and wild mushrooms, as well as their use of plant-based medicine to cope with pain and illness.
Scientists said on Wednesday they genetically analyzed plaque from 48,000-year-old Neanderthal remains from Spain and 36,000-year-old remains from Belgium. The plaque, material that forms on and between teeth, contained food particles as well as microbes from the mouth and the respiratory and gastrointestinal tracts.
At Belgium’s Spy Cave site, which at the time was a hilly grassy environment home to big game, the Neanderthal diet was meat-based with woolly rhinoceros and wild sheep, along with wild mushrooms. Some 12,000 years earlier, at Spain’s El Sidron Cave site, which was a densely forested environment likely lacking large animals, the diet was wild mushrooms, pine nuts, moss and tree bark, with no sign of meat.
The two populations apparently lived different lifestyles shaped by their environments, the researchers said.
The researchers found that an adolescent male from the Spanish site had a painful dental abscess and an intestinal parasite that causes severe diarrhea. The plaque DNA showed he had consumed poplar bark, containing the pain-killing active ingredient of aspirin, and a natural antibiotic mold.
“This study really gives us a glimpse of what was in a Neanderthal’s medicine cabinet,” said paleomicrobiologist Laura Weyrich of Australia’s University of Adelaide, lead author of the study published in the journal Nature.
The findings added to the growing body of knowledge about Neanderthals, the closest extinct relative of our species, Homo Sapiens, and further debunked the outdated notion of them as humankind’s dimwitted cousins.
“I definitely believe our research suggests Neanderthals were highly capable, intelligent, likely friendly beings. We really need to rewrite the history books about their ‘caveman-like’ behaviors. They were very human-like behaviors,” Weyrich said.
The robust, large-browed Neanderthals prospered across Europe and Asia from about 350,000 years ago until going extinct roughly 35,000 years ago after our species, which first appeared in Africa 200,000 years ago, established itself in regions where Neanderthals lived.
Scientists say Neanderthals were intelligent, with complex hunting methods, probable use of spoken language and symbolic objects, and sophisticated fire usage.
The researchers also reconstructed the genome of a 48,000-year-old oral bacterium from one of the Neanderthals.
“This is the oldest microbial genome to date, by about 43,000 years,” Weyrich said.
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From: MeNeedIt
U.S. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross said on Wednesday that substantial negotiations to revamp the North American Free Trade Agreement likely will not get started until the latter part of this year and could take a year to complete.
Ross, speaking to Bloomberg Television, said U.S. legal notification requirements with partners Mexico and Canada create some built-in delays to the start of substantial discussions.
“You’re talking probably the latter part of this year before the real negotiations get underway,” Ross said.
NAFTA renegotiation ‘complex’
The 79-year-old billionaire investor, who was sworn into his job just last week, said he hoped the renegotiations could be completed within a year, but it was unclear how long it would take to see benefits like a smaller U.S. trade deficit with Mexico.
He said the NAFTA renegotiation would be “complex,” with more than 20 chapters in the 23-year-old agreement that needed to be modernized, along with new chapters such as those covering the digital economy and other sectors that did not exist in the early 1990s.
Without a U.S. Trade Representative in office, Ross is taking the lead on trade negotiation issues in the early weeks of the Trump administration.
Agreement needs to be updated
In Detroit last week, Mexican economy minister Ildefonso Guajardo said he was hopeful that Mexico, Canada and the United States could begin discussions in June to “modernize” NAFTA, stressing that Mexico would not accept tariffs.
A less belligerent U.S. tone towards Mexican trade in recent weeks has lifted the Mexican peso from historic lows of about 22 to the dollar in January to about 19.6.
But Ross said on Wednesday that Mexico would have to make some concessions to the United States.
Trump to study House proposal
President Donald Trump during his election campaign threatened to slap 35 percent tariffs on Mexican imports. He is studying a House Republican proposal for a border tax adjustment system that would levy a 20 percent tax on all imports while exempting exports. The plan is partly aimed at offsetting value-added taxes charged on imports by Mexico and many other countries.
Ross said Trump “has made my job a lot easier by softening up the adverse parties. What could be better than going into a negotiation where the fellow on the other side knows he has to make concessions?”
The new Commerce secretary also said he was not concerned about starting trade wars, because the United States was already fighting one.
“We’ve been in a trade war for decades,” he said. “The difference is now our troops are coming to the ramparts.”
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From: MeNeedIt
Baldness is inevitable in many aging men, but it may be of particular concern to men who are short.
A new study has found that males of short stature are at increased risk of losing their hair prematurely, in addition to a number of other health conditions.
The study analyzed the genomes of more than 20,000 men, about half of whom had gone bald well before they turned 50. The other half of participants had no hair loss and were used for comparison.
The study included men from the United States, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Germany, the United Kingdom, Greece and Australia. The researchers identified 63 alterations in the human genome that increase the risk of premature baldness. And in many instances, the DNA regions overlapped with genes for short stature.
The investigators at the University of Bonn in Germany also found overlaps in bald men for a number of other physical characteristics and illnesses.
These included genes not only coding for shortness but also for traits predisposing the men to early puberty and an increased risk of prostate cancer. There’s also evidence that Parkinson’s disease is more common in men who start going bald at a younger age.
Geneticist Stefanie Heilmann-Heimbach, a lead author of the study, noted that researchers were hunting for baldness genes in particular when they made the other findings.
Until now, she said, associations between baldness and early age of puberty and prostate cancer had been noted only in population studies, “so with this study, this was really the first time that so many traits popped up.”
The work was published in the journal Nature Communications.
Heart disease link
The researchers also discovered genes that may put shorter males at a higher risk for heart disease, but they said that association was less clear than the one for early puberty. Researchers found the genes for heart disease in the same region of the genome with genes that may play a role in a reduced risk.
But back to the hair. It’s been noted that genetics are not destiny, and Heilmann-Heimbach said young men who are short should not worry that they are necessarily going to lose their locks at an early age.
“All the other family members — if they kept their hair and are also somehow the same body height, then I wouldn’t be too afraid to lose my hair,” she said.
Investigators said their gene study finding an association between baldness, short stature and other health conditions was only a first step. They said they were eager to discover the underlying biological mechanisms that increase the risk of short men losing their hair at an early age. Understanding that may help provide more clues as to why shorter males are also at increased risk for other diseases and conditions.
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From: MeNeedIt
Nike will launch a hijab for female Muslim athletes early next year, becoming the first major sports apparel maker to offer a traditional Islamic head scarf designed specifically for competition, the company said on Wednesday.
The head covering, marketed under the “Pro Hijab” brand, is designed to allow athletes to observe the traditional Islamic practice of covering the head without compromising performance.
Made from a lightweight, flexible material, the hijab is expected to hit stores shelves in early 2018, Nike said in a statement.
In recent years, the hijab has become the most visible symbol of Islamic culture in the United States and Europe. Many Muslim women cover their heads in public with the hijab as a sign of modesty, but some critics see it as a sign of female oppression.
With sensitivities over immigration and the perceived threat of Muslim extremism running high, the head scarf has led to attacks against Muslim women. At the same time, the hijab has evolved in a symbol of diversity that Nike has embraced.
The Women’s March on Washington, held the day after President Donald Trump’s inauguration, used the face of a woman wearing a hijab in an American flag pattern as its promotional image.
Muslim athletes visiting Nike’s headquarters in Beaverton, Oregon, just outside of Portland, have complained about the difficulties of wearing a hijab while competing, according to the company.
The company consulted with Muslim women athletes from around the world, including Middle Eastern runners and cyclists, in the designing the hijab.
Other companies have also set their sights on hijab sales to Muslim athletes.
Last year, Danish sportswear company Hummel unveiled a soccer jersey with an attached hijab for the Afghanistan national women’s soccer team.
Non-professional women Muslim athletes have used athletic hijabs made by smaller companies.
But Nike’s annual net sales in the billions and its reach in popular culture can do more to bring Muslim athletes into the fold, said Amna Al Haddad, a Nike sponsored weightlifter from the United Arab Emirates who consulted on “Pro Hijab.”
“[It will] encourage a whole new generation to pursue sports without feeling there is a limitation because of modesty or dress-code,” Haddad said.
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From: MeNeedIt
Wednesday March 8 marks International Women’s Day, with festivals, concerts and exhibitions among the numerous events planned around the world to celebrate the achievements of women in society.
The annual event has been held since the early 1900s and traditionally promotes a different theme each year, with this year’s edition calling on people to #BeBoldForChange and push for a more gender-inclusive working world.
Reuters photographers have been speaking with women in a range of professions around the world about their experiences of gender inequality.
Here are just a few of the women and their comments:
Doris Leuthard, Switzerland
Doris Leuthard says she still sees gender inequality occur in the workplace.
“Salaries. The differences between wages of men and women can be up to 20 percent. It happens to many women. Transparency helps, discussions about salaries are important. In upper management and leading positions in politics we still seem to be the minority. I encourage women to work on their career,” she said.
Cristina Alvarez, Mexico
“I’ve never felt any gender inequality,” Alvarez said.
“I believe women can do the same jobs as men and that there should be no discrimination.”
Serpil Cigdem, Turkey
“When I applied for a job 23 years ago as an engine driver, I was told that it is a profession for men. I knew that during the written examination even if I got the same results with a male candidate, he would have been chosen. That’s why I worked hard to pass the exam with a very good result ahead of the male candidates,” Cigdem said.
“In my opinion, gender inequality starts in our minds saying it’s a male profession or it’s a man’s job,” she said.
Phung Thi Hai, Vietnam
Hai is among a group of 25 women working at a brick factory where she has to move 3,000 bricks a day to the kiln.
“How unfair that a 54-year-old woman like me has to work and take care of the whole family. With the same work male laborers can get a better income. Not only me, all women in the village work very hard with no education, no insurance and no future,” she said.
Tomoe Ichino, Japan
“In general, people think being a Shinto priest is a man’s profession. If you’re a woman, they think you’re a shrine maiden, or a supplementary priestess. People don’t know women Shinto priests exist, so they think we can’t perform rituals. Once, after I finished performing jiichinsai [ground-breaking ceremony], I was asked, ‘So, when is the priest coming?,’” Ichino said.
“When I first began working as a Shinto priest, because I was young and female, some people felt the blessing was different. They thought: ‘I would have preferred your grandfather.’”
“At first, I wore my grandfather’s light green garment because I thought it’s better to look like a man. But after a while I decided to be proud of the fact that I am a female priest and I began wearing a pink robe, like today. I thought I can be more confident if I stop thinking too much [about my gender].”
Yanis Reina, Venezuela
“No doubt this is a job initially intended for men, because you have to be standing on the street all your shift, it is dirty, greasy and there is always a strong gasoline smell. I have to adapt the pants of my uniform because they are men’s and make me look weird but I adore my work. My clients are like my relatives, they come here everyday and we chat a couple of minutes while the tank is being filled. They come every day because they feel safer to be served by a woman,” Reina said.
“With the difficult situation that we have in Venezuela, having a job that covers your expenses is almost a luxury, but beyond that, I’m very proud of my job. I believe that now we, the women, have to be the warriors,” she said.
Januka Shrestha, Nepal
“There is no difference in a vehicle driven by a woman and man. While driving on the road people sometimes try to dominate a vehicle especially when they see a woman driving it,” she said.
“People have even used foul language toward me. When this happens I keep quiet and work even harder to prove that we are as capable as men,” Shrestha said.
Maxine Mallett, Britain
“The most stressful time of my career was when I had children. Women who return to work after having a child are sometimes treated with suspicion, as if they now lack commitment to the school when it is quite the opposite,” Mallett said.
“We need to remove barriers and support all. Having a fulfilling career should not have to be a battle that you have to constantly fight.”
Jeung Un, South Korea
“Most news outlets prefer to employ male photographers. I feel strongly about gender inequality,” Un said.
“When I cover violent scenes, sometimes I am harassed and hear sexually-biased remarks.”
Deng Qiyan, China
“Sometimes [gender inequality] happens,” Qiyan said.
“But we cannot do anything about that. After all, you have to digest all those unhappy things and carry on.”
Emilie Jeannin, France
“Once I could not help laughing when an agricultural advisor asked me, where the boss was, when I was standing right in front of him. I can assure you that the meeting got very quickly cut short!,” Jeannin said.
“Being a breeder is seen as a man’s job. In the past women were usually doing the administrative work or low level tasks. People need to be more open-minded. This change needs to happen everywhere not just on the fields.”
Meet more of the women in our photo gallery:
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From: MeNeedIt