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Socioeconomic inequality is 'the unequal distribution of income and opportunity between different groups in society'. 

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Socioeconomic inequality is 'the unequal distribution of income and opportunity between different groups in society'. 

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Economic inequality is the unequal distribution of income and opportunity between different groups in society. There are wide varieties of economic inequality, most notably income inequality measured using the distribution of income (the amount of money people are paid) and wealth inequality measured using the distribution of wealth (the amount of wealth people own).

Researchers have found higher rates of health and social problems and lower rates of social cohesion in countries and states with higher inequality.

Adapted from Wikipedia

What APA is doing

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Economic inequality is the unequal distribution of income and opportunity between different groups in society.

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Indigenous peoples are people who originate from a particular area and they are 'distinct social and cultural groups that share collective ancestral ties to the lands and natural resources where they live, occupy or from which they have been displaced'.  

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Indigenous peoples are people who originate from a particular area and they are 'distinct social and cultural groups that share collective ancestral ties to the lands and natural resources where they live, occupy or from which they have been displaced'.  

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The World Bank aims to promote indigenous peoples’ development in a manner which ensures that the development process fosters full respect for the dignity, human rights, and uniqueness of indigenous peoples.

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Global & local question 1: Who are the stakeholders? Who does socioeconomical inequality affect around the world and in my area?

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Global & local question 1: Who are the stakeholders? Who does socioeconomical inequality affect around the world and in my area?

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Socioeconomic inequality is one of the most pressing issues American society is grappling with. How does it play out over generations and how have those inequalities led to discrepancies in wealth, especially for people of color?

This year's Boston University Diversity and Inclusion (D&I) annual Learn More series is focused on an exploration of social class, and the latest installment of the virtual series is today, Wednesday, October 21, featuring noted sociologist Dalton Conley, Henry Putnam University Professor in Sociology at Princeton University.

Conley's talk, Construction and Understanding of Social Class, will examine the effects of socioeconomic equality, how it can be inherited across generations, and how it affects access to wealth among people of color. The event begins at 4 pm.

The author of several books, including Being Black, Living in the Red: Race, Wealth, and Social Policy in America (University of California Press, 2009), The Pecking Order (Vintage, 2009), Elsewhere, USA (Vintage, 2008), and Parentology (Simon & Schuster, 2014), Conley is also a faculty affiliate at Princeton's Office of Population Research and Center for Health and Wellbeing and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He serves in a pro bono capacity as dean of health sciences at the University of the People, an accredited, tuition-free online college that strives to increase accessibility to higher education.

BU Today spoke with Conley ahead of today's talk.

BU Today: How is socioeconomic status inherited? How does generational wealth or its lack affect an individual's economic mobility?

Conley: Today, we typically measure socioeconomic status with four measures. First is someone's education level, second is occupation (which can be rank-ordered through a methodology by their prestige), third is their income level, and fourth is their wealth level (accumulated or lack thereof). Those four together we feel composite the resources an individual has to bring to bear in society, and we call that socioeconomic status. There are other dimensions, like political power, but I think that if you use those four measures, it's a pretty good summary of what someone's relative position in society is from a socioeconomic perspective.

How it's inherited is not something that we know a definitive answer to. My earlier work was on the impact of parental wealth. Back in the '90s, when I was studying it, there were three measures: education, occupation, and income. I was a part of a group of new scholars that was saying, "No, we really have to consider wealth." Wealth is an important component of class, and in some cases, it's literally passed on through inheritance or gifts. What we found was that if you consider all of those dimensions and more, like age, appearance, marital status, race, and so on, when you throw them all in a model together to see what actually matters for the offspring and their socioeconomic status, it turns out that the single biggest effect is parents' education level, and second to that is parental wealth.

When you think about that, it illustrates the two main mechanisms by which parents pass on advantage or disadvantage socially. Education captures parental attitudes towards education, how much they value it, and what sort of cognitive and noncognitive skills they have to pass on to their kids. Wealth is the money side of it, and a lot of it is in the form of their home. If they're homeowners, that is correlated with the quality of your kids' schooling because in the United States, we finance local schools predominantly through local property taxes. Then, how much wealth the parents have influences whether you're able to go to college, whether you're able to stay in college without having to take a job, which in turn influences your performance and whether or not you're likely to get through in four years. If you think about income, when you send your kids to college, you're not thinking, "Yeah, I'll just skim a little off my weekly paycheck." You pay out of wealth, out of money that you saved up for a long time, like a college savings plan, or loans.

In your book Being Black, Living in the Red, you discuss the relationship between race and wealth mobility. How does race influence someone's economic status?

It goes two ways, and I think that it's a cycle. In that research, what I found was that if you look at, for example, college graduation rates, there is a racial gap. However, when you just simply compare, say, African Americans and white Americans on likelihood of graduating with a four-year bachelor's degree, you're really comparing apples and oranges, because you're comparing, on average, people who came from vastly different economic resources in their families. There's an income gap, like a pay gap, by race, and that's substantial.

But if you look at the wealth gap, the wealth gap has been consistently about one to 10, meaning that the typical, or median, African American family has 10 cents of wealth to the dollar of wealth of the typical median white family.

What I found is [that] a huge racial gap in wealth seems to be the engine of continued wealth inequality in a post-1960s era, meaning that it's not that race doesn't matter in society, but for example, education differences by race are actually differences by family wealth levels. Differences in premarital or teenage childbearing are actually differences in teenage childbearing rates by family wealth levels. There is a difference in likelihood of relying on public assistance or welfare by race, but actually, that's not a race difference, it's a difference by family wealth level. So really, what appear to be race effects in a lot of domains like education, welfare, and so forth, are actually wealth effects. They're not explainable by just income differences and savings rate differences between them. They're a product of a lot of different factors, contemporary and historical, but that wealth gap is not just going to go away itself if we have equal education or even equal incomes.

It's a legacy of hundreds of years of racial inequality. And institutions and policies and market dynamics generate it still today. The argument of that book is that if we want to address racial equality or equity, one of the main things we should be tackling is the wealth gap. It doesn't do everything, like solve differences in police violence, but for a lot of the disparities, like educational disparities, the best policy for racial equity and education would actually be racial equity and wealth. Unfortunately, people like their wealth, and it's very hard to have a very progressive wealth policy; even in much more socialistic countries in Europe, when there have been wealth taxes imposed for redistribution, there have been political revolts. So it is a challenge, but it is an important challenge.

Has the relationship between wealth and race in America changed? If so, how?

Unfortunately, the answer is a short one: It has not changed. Some of the institutions that prevented minority wealth accumulation in the past are now gone, like redlining, which was an official practice in the early 20th century. That's the process by which banks would draw a red line on maps of neighborhoods and draw a red line around minority neighborhoods and not give any loans to those neighborhoods. Things like a racially restrictive covenant, where an owner could stipulate that the future owner could only sell or rent their house to people of a particular race, are illegal now. Segregated public facilities were made illegal in the 1960s.

There are clearly things that have changed that have affected wealth distribution, but it's very tenacious, almost like a weed. It's still there. And the crazy thing is that over my entire lifetime of 50 years, since there have been measures of wealth inequality, the race gaps have been stable. We haven't really directly tackled it, but we have chipped away at it with different policies, and yet things haven't changed. It probably requires a much more direct policy shift in the environment to do something about it. Others hope that if we continue to equalize education and continue to have incomes inched closer together slowly, that by spillover, that will reduce the wealth gap, but I personally believe that it will require something much more dramatic, like wealth taxes and universal baby bonds, something that [New Jersey Democratic Senator] Cory Booker talked about in his brief campaign for president, where every child in America gets a pre-funded savings account that can be used later on.

Dalton Conley will speak on Construction and Understanding of Social Class, part of the Diversity & Inclusion Learn More Series, on Wednesday, October 21, at 4 pm. Register to attend virtually.
Explore Related Topics:

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How Does Socioeconomic Inequality Affect Social Class, Especially for People of Color?

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Princeton University sociologist Dalton Conley will give a virtual lecture on the effects of intergenerational socioeconomic inequality as part of BU Diversity & Inclusion's Learn More Series today, October 21, at 4 pm.

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Everyone has socioeconomic status, however people who have a 'lower status' may face inequalities due to this, or may have a 'lower statue' because of previous generations of their family or because of different reasons, like race, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, poverty, etc.

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Therefore, socioeconomic inequality affects people who may not have a 'higher' socioeconomic status, so this could include homeless people, people dealing with debt or poverty, people who aren't wealthy (inherited from past generations), people without a good education, etc.

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Global & local question 2: how did socioeconomic status and inequalities come about?

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Global & local question 2: how did socioeconomic status and inequalities come about?

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Socioeconomic status came about because there have always been different classes in society, which we now refer to these as lower class, middle class, upper class, etc. A person's socioeconomic status is defined in multiple ways, and different people have different levels of these things, for example, education, wealth, occupation, and income.

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Because not everyone has the same chances in life and are not born with an equal amount of money or opportunities, there are socioeconomic inequalities. Some of these come from systemic issues, like racism, homophobia, sexism, that have been around for centuries and have made lasting problems when it comes to socioeconomic status.

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Global & local question 1: who are Indigenous peoples around the world and in my area?

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Global & local question 1: who are Indigenous peoples around the world and in my area?

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Port Hope and the area around it has been occupied and respected by Indigenous peoples for many years. Some of these people include the Huron-Wendat, Haudenosaunee, Anishnaabeg, and Metis people.

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Global & local question 2: how are socioeconomic inequalities affecting  Indigenous peoples?

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Global & local question 2: how are socioeconomic inequalities affecting  Indigenous peoples?

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Abstract

Indigenous populations in Canada have experienced social, economic, and political disadvantages through colonialism. The policies implemented to assimilate Aboriginal peoples have dissolved cultural continuity and unfavorably shaped their health outcomes. As a result, indigenous Canadians face health inequities such as chronic illness, food insecurity, and mental health crises. In 2015, the Canadian government affirmed their responsibility for indigenous inequalities following a historic report by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. It has outlined intergenerational traumata imposed upon Aboriginals through decades of systemic discrimination in the form of the Residential School System and the Indian Act. As these policies have crossed multiple lifespans and generations, societal conceptualization of indigenous health inequities must include social determinants of health (SDOH) intersecting with the life course approach to health development to fully capture the causes of intergenerational maintenance of poor health outcomes. To provide culturally sensitive care for those who have experienced intergenerational trauma, health care providers should be aware of and understand two key SDOH inequity influencing the indigenous life course, including the residential school system and loss of socioeconomic status, over time due to colonialism.

Keywords: Aboriginal, Canada, colonialism, health equity, social determinants of health

Introduction

Compared to the general population, indigenous Canadians suffer from disproportionate increases in diabetes, hypertension, substance abuse, mental health concerns, and overall morbidity and mortality in addition to having significantly reduced life expectancy. To conceptualize the origins of these disparities, exploring the social determinants of health (SDOH) can provide a strong framework of understanding. Proximal SDOH are often relied upon to explain inequities on a social scale as they include direct health-related behaviors, physical environments, and socioeconomic status (SES). Systems level influencers such as the health care system, education system, community, environmental stewardship, and cultural continuity have been deemed intermediate SDOH, while colonialism, racism, and self determination have been identified as distal SDOH. Focus will be given to the most pertinent distal SDOH for indigenous Canadians, colonialism, and how it has shifted the trajectories of the intermediate and proximal SDOH to produce intergenerational health inequities.

For Aboriginal populations, health is an overarching concept through the stages of life that comprise physical and mental wellbeing, as well as spiritual and cultural cohesion. Thus, effective indigenous health policies must be culturally sensitive and not impose definitions of health from ethnocentric perspectives. By definition, colonial policies contained culturally insensitive agendas to promote assimilation. The residential school system promoted family separation and cultural dissociation during childhood and adolescence, critical stages in the life course approach to health development (LCHD) that determine cognitive and social capacity into early adulthood and beyond. By utilizing the LCHD, a theory that traces health problems back to specific stages of life and their associated SDOH, it is possible to understand how cumulative disadvantages imposed upon Aboriginals have not only caused health inequities but also intergenerational trauma.

Residential School System

The residential school system was a highly controversial policy which instigated the dissociation of spiritual and cultural cohesion within Aboriginal communities. It was one of the most compelling pieces of evidence illustrating the nature of colonialism and its deleterious policies that caused the decline of indigenous populations in not only their overall health but also their sociocultural functioning. When the Indian Act was passed in 1876, this provided the foundation for the residential school system until 1996 when the last federal residential school was closed. The Canadian government mandated this policy to facilitate the assimilation of Aboriginal children into Euro-Canadian culture. Childhood and adolescence are vital times of cognitive learning and relationship maturation, so it is important to consider the impact of the residential school system on indigenous health with respect to the LCHD. In childhood, access to quality education is a protective factor for future health status because it promotes academic and social skills development, increases health literacy, and enables positive interpersonal development. However, this is only possible if the educational setting is provisioned with caring instructors, support networks, and ample resources to maintain a rich learning environment. The residential school system was not designed to provide any of these essential resources. Children were taken from their families to attend residential schools by government officials, placing extreme emotional stress on indigenous parents and their children. Being forced to attend against their will, over 81.3% of students felt isolated from their families. Family separation in childhood has been shown to be a major risk factor for mental disorders such as depression. Indeed, the literature has shown that family stress can cause dysregulation in brain function later in life. These findings demonstrate how family disruption may have negatively influenced Aboriginal mental health at later stages in the LCHD due to colonial policies. In school, ethnocentric rules were mandated and children were banned from speaking their native language or practicing any cultural customs. A study found that 76.8% of students recognized a significant loss in cultural identity due to their residential school experience. While our society may not include cultural identity in the definition of health, Aboriginals consider cultural cohesion to be strongly related to their health. Therefore, loss in cultural identity was a loss of health due to the residential school system instigated through colonial perspectives. Instructors enforcing these policies further contributed to the problem by verbally, emotionally, and even physically abusing students. As a child, negative relationships with caregivers and teachers can have serious implications on behavior, adjustment, and attitudes in adolescence and early adulthood. Childhood abuse has also been linked to poor health status, leading to increased hospitalizations for physical and psychological illnesses in adulthood. In a 2012 study by Elias et al., 48.1% of residential school attendees reported an abuse history, and those who were abused experienced increased rates of suicidal thoughts and suicide attempts. An important aspect of the child-teacher relationship is closeness, which is positively correlated with success in school and personal initiative. The abuse experienced by these children eliminated any possible positive outcomes related to academic success and ambition that residential schools were supposed to promote which is evident today by more than half of the Canadian Aboriginal population without high school diplomas. For students who managed to graduate, ineffective education resulting from trauma, cultural inhibition, and racism by teachers led to reduced employment opportunities and decreased SES. Clearly, the residential school system was detrimental to the indigenous population and paved the way for dysfunctional social and cognitive development in countless generations of Aboriginal children even after residential school policies were removed. The LCHD views health on a continuum, and as such, the survivors of the residential school system were not the only ones affected. Attendees who experienced trauma may exhibit not only intragenerational reduced health status but they also pass on their competencies or perhaps, lack of competencies, to future generations. Being in an indigenous family with residential school history has been linked to increased stress and decreased overall wellbeing, supporting the finding that colonialism has resulted in cumulative health disadvantage for existing generations of Aboriginals even if they did not directly live through colonial policies. Nonattendees of parents who were residential school survivors experience increased abuse which appears to solidify the concept of intergenerational trauma. Personal interviews revealed that the attendees felt that their parenting abilities were inadequate due to the lack of practical education and overall trauma they lived through. These individuals who did not gain key competencies and developed negative relationships in their childhood and adolescence at residential schools were likely to reproduce such environments for their offspring, causing a vicious cycle of health disadvantage. This meant that their children would also be less able to cope with stressors in life, leading to negative health outcomes.

Loss of SES

The residential school system ultimately limited employment opportunities for Aboriginals, which led to reduced SES. This was exacerbated by the lack of economic development in indigenous communities because the Canadian government implemented economic policies that focused on development in new or unseated lands from Aboriginals. The reserve system was one of the colonial policies that mediated economic isolation in indigenous communities. By placing Aboriginals on reserves and providing them with minimal financial support and no sustainable economic opportunities, the government forced them to integrate into new settler communities or succumb to relative poverty. Today, we know that many people on reserves suffer from impoverished living conditions and report that the lack of resources contribute to their economic insecurity. SES has been strongly correlated with health outcomes which is known as the socioeconomic gradient in health. People with lower SES tend to have reduced health status compared to their higher SES counterparts. This is a global phenomenon and the indigenous population is no exception. The unemployment rate is over two times higher for Aboriginal people relative to the general population. Unemployment has been linked to increased physical and mental illness and mortality, further supporting low SES as a risk factor for poor Aboriginal health. The health consequences of poor economic development and SES in indigenous communities are aggravated by the lack of access to basic goods and services such as healthy foods and medical support. A significant number of Aboriginals cannot afford medical treatment or transportation to hospitals, illustrating the severity of relative poverty being experienced on reserves. Their ability to access appropriate medical attention is limited by their low SES, which is a direct causative relationship to the poor health seen in Aboriginal communities across the nation. Furthermore, the lack of healthy food options act in synergy with low SES. For example, women with low income tend to be more obese than women with high income, which is intensified when Aboriginals cannot access any healthy foods. Children are more likely to be obese if their parents are obese, indicating that behaviors related to health are learned directly from parents. As obesity is associated with morbidity and increased risk for disease, this poses evidence for negative health outcomes later in life due to low SES impacting early childhood behavioral development. With the prevalence of food insecurity caused by low SES in Aboriginal families, it is possible to conclude that poor diet plays a key role in the health inequities seen on reserves. Moreover, nutrition is tightly tied to academic success, and children with low SES are less likely to succeed in school resulting in higher unemployment. Therefore, indigenous children from low SES families may not be able to work to their full potential in school due to inadequate nutrition, leading to health disadvantage later in life. Poor nutrition is a cumulative process because the body relies heavily on the food resources available during childhood and adolescence to determine physical abilities, cognition, and health outcomes in adulthood and beyond. With a compromised diet, as seen in many indigenous communities with low SES, children can experience poor physical and mental growth and increased susceptibility to disease in adulthood.

Conclusion

The effects of colonialism on the Canadian Aboriginal population are far-reaching and evident in the health inequities seen today. The LCHD can be used to illustrate the impact of colonial policies on existing and future generations because it provides a platform to study the SDOH through the LCHD within the Aboriginal community and helps us define indigenous health in a culturally sensitive manner. While there have been many detrimental policies such as the residential school system and reserve system, we can study how the intentions and implementations of these policies can be changed for positive outcomes. Although the intergenerational impact of colonialism on Aboriginals has manifested itself in negative health outcomes, affirmative action can be taken to break the cycle of cumulative health disadvantages. Understanding and integrating historical knowledge into trauma informed care will also prove beneficial for this population and improve relationships between health care providers and indigenous patients. We can ensure that health at each life stage, particularly at sensitive stages such as childhood and adolescence, is addressed according to the needs of Aboriginals by directly working together with indigenous patients and communities.

Acknowledgments

The author has been privileged with life experiences from friends, family, and patients alike through his medical training to have contributed to perspectives seen in this article.

Abbreviations Used

Author Disclosure Statement

No competing financial interests exist.

Cite this article as: Kim PJ (2019) Social determinants of health inequities in indigenous canadians through a life course approach to colonialism and the residential school system, Health Equity 3:1, 378-381, DOI: 10.1089/heq.2019.0041.

References

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Social Determinants of Health Inequities in Indigenous Canadians Through a Life Course Approach to Colonialism and the Residential School System

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Indigenous populations in Canada have experienced social, economic, and political disadvantages through colonialism. The policies implemented to assimilate Aboriginal peoples have dissolved cultural continuity and unfavorably shaped their health outcomes. As a result, indigenous Canadians face health inequities such as chronic illness, food insecurity, and mental health crises.

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Understanding the Overrepresentation of Indigenous People - State of the Criminal Justice System Dashboard

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Web Experience Toolkit (WET) includes reusable components for building and maintaining innovative Web sites that are accessible, usable, and interoperable. These reusable components are open source software and free for use by departments and external Web communities

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How can socioeconomic inequality for Indigenous peoples  be seen on the National level?

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How can socioeconomic inequality for Indigenous peoples  be seen on the National level?

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How can socioeconomic inequality for Indigenous peoples  be seen on the Global level?

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How can socioeconomic inequality for Indigenous peoples  be seen on the Global level?

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Why is it important to address socioeconomic inequality for Indigenous peoples?

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Why is it important to address socioeconomic inequality for Indigenous peoples?

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1. It can educate people and help them better understand what socioeconomic inequality is

2. It can help people understand other forms of inequality that different minorities face

3. It can educate members of government and help them strive to do more and make more positive change

4. It can help people understand more about Indigenous people in the present, can help tie issues today to the past, and help improve the future

5. It is important to address the issues that many Indigenous people are facing and to acknowledge that they are there

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Socioeconomic inequality for Indigenous people in Canada:

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Socioeconomic inequality for Indigenous people in Canada:

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Indigenous peoples in Canada face socioeconomic inequality in many ways. One of these ways is with income inequality. For example in 2010, non-Indigenous peoples working on urban reserves earn 34% more than Indigenous workers.

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Socioeconomic inequality for Indigenous people around the world:

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Socioeconomic inequality for Indigenous people around the world:

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Indigenous people make up a large population of people who are poor, illiterate, and unemployed. Indigenous people make up 5% of the world's population, yet 15% of people living in poverty around the world.

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A continuing injustice. Indigenous peoples suffer from the consequences of historic injustice, including colonization, dispossession of their lands, territories and resources, oppression and discrimination, as well as lack of control over their own ways of life. Their right to development has been largely denied by colonial and modern states in the pursuit of economic growth. As a consequence, indigenous peoples often lose out to more powerful actors, becoming among the most impoverished groups in their countries.

One-third of the world's poor. Indigenous peoples continue to be over-represented among the poor, the illiterate, and the unemployed. Indigenous peoples number about 370 million. While they constitute approximately 5 per cent of the world's population, indigenous peoples make up 15 per cent of the world's poor. They also make up about one-third of the world's 900 million extremely poor rural people.

Suicide, violence and incarceration. Smoking and substance abuse are more common amongst indigenous peoples; suicide rates and incarceration rates are also higher. These problems are more pronounced in urban areas, where indigenous peoples are detached from their communities and cultures, yet seldom fully embraced as equal members of the dominant society. Indigenous peoples are also more likely to suffer from violent crime.

A problem in developed countries too. The well-being of indigenous peoples is an issue not only in developing countries. Even in developed countries, indigenous peoples consistently lag behind the non-indigenous population in terms of most indicators of well-being. They live shorter lives, have poorer health care and education and endure higher unemployment rates. A native Aboriginal child born in Australia today can expect to die almost 20 years earlier than his non-native compatriot. Obesity, type 2 diabetes and tuberculosis are now major health concerns amongst indigenous peoples in developed countries.

High levels of poverty. Studies of socio-economic conditions of indigenous peoples in Latin America show that being indigenous is associated with being poor and that over time, that condition has stayed constant. Even when they are able to accumulate human capital [i.e. education or training opportunities], they are unable to convert that to significantly greater earnings or to reduce the poverty gap with the non-indigenous population. This finding holds for countries where indigenous peoples are a small fraction of the overall population, such as Mexico and Chile, as well as in countries where a large portion of the population is indigenous, such as in Bolivia.

Recent Developments

Ibero-American Plan of Action for the Implementation of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples

In April 2018, the indigenous peoples and States as members of the Fund for the Development of Indigenous Peoples of Latin America and the Caribbean (FILAC) adopted the Ibero-American Plan of Action for the Implementation of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

Read more about the adoption of Ibero-American Plan here.

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Economic and Social Development | United Nations For Indigenous Peoples

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A continuing injustice. Indigenous peoples suffer from the consequences of historic injustice, including colonization, dispossession of their lands, territories and resources, oppression and discrimination, as well as lack of control over their own ways of life. Their right to development has been largely denied by colonial and modern states in the pursuit of economic growth.

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Malala is a Pakistani female education activist. She won the Nobel Peace Prize at the age of 17. She was born in 1997 and is currently 26 years old.

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What was Malala's upbringing and childhood like?

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What was Malala's upbringing and childhood like?

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Malala was born July 12, 1997 in Pakistan. She had a happy and peaceful childhood. Her father was a teacher and ran a school for girls which Malala attended. Many Pakistani girls did not attend school, however Malala was fortunate enough to.

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When Malala was around 10 years old, the Taliban took over. Many of the rules that the Taliban enforced were that girls were not allowed to go to school, allowed to leave their homes without the company of a male, etc. This made her daily life very stressful and hard.

When Malala was 15 years old, she was shot in the head by a member of the Taliban. She was brought to a hospital, then later flown to a hospital in England to undergo surgery. Doctors were unsure whether or not she would live, however she did survive.

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Today (2024) Malala has now graduated from Oxford University and is currently married. She has her own production company that has a deal with Apple TV+. She won the nobel peace prize in October of 2014. In 2013, she wrote a biography, and in 2015 the audiobook version of it won a Grammy Award. Malala now lives in England.

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What did Malala do to make a difference?

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What did Malala do to make a difference?

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Malala is known and became famous for fighting for women's rights, specifically women's rights to education, and activism against the Taliban and their restrictions in Pakistan. She also wrote a blog for the BBC.

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What was her blog about and how did that make a difference?

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What was her blog about and how did that make a difference?

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In 2009, the BBC reached out to Malala's father asking if she would be willing to write for them about her life as a girl in Pakistan under Taliban rule. Even though it was dangerous, she wanted to do it, so her father accepted. "Malala Yousufzai was one of the few brave voices who spoke out", writes The Daily Telegraph's Pakistan. Malala wrote her blog anonymously, otherwise she could've faced physical violence or even death. Her blog brought to light the abuse and acts of terrorism that the Taliban caused and showed the world what was happening when others were too afraid to speak out. Many call her a "Pakistani heroine" for her bravery surrounding this.

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How did her being shot contribute to her activism?

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How did her being shot contribute to her activism?

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On October 9th, 2012, Malala was shot in the head while on a bus by a member of the Taliban. Many had heard on her activism and about her speaking out for women's educational rights, and some wanted to put a stop to that. The Taliban took responsibility on trying to take her life. She was quickly flown from Pakistan to Birmingham, England, for surgery. She was only fifteen years old when she was shot. Malala was very lucky and survived. Malala being shot sparked many protests all around the world. These protests led to a petition to have all girls back in school by 2015.

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Is Malala still making a difference in the world?

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Is Malala still making a difference in the world?

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Malala was named Time Magazine's most influential people in 2013. She continues to raise awareness on gender inequality, women's educational rights, and women's rights to this day for women all around the world.

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Do you think the individual’s/group’s actions were effective?

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Do you think the individual’s/group’s actions were effective?

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I absolutely think that Malala's efforts were effective. I think that she made a massive difference in Pakistan and around the world for women and girls.

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What are some statistics that go with Malala's efforts?

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What are some statistics that go with Malala's efforts?

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Because of Malala's activism, incredible progress has been made towards increasing access to education for women and girls. This includes all levels of education. It increased enrolment rates in schools, which without a doubt would increase graduation and employment rates for women and girls all over the world.

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How has her activism specifically impacted Pakistan?

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How has her activism specifically impacted Pakistan?

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Malala's blog as well as her activism drew global attention to the many issues in Pakistan as well as women's educational rights. This lead to protests and petitions which helped get many women and girls the education they deserved.

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Malala co-funded a non-profit organization. In 2013, she co-authored "I Am Malala", a biography and an international best-seller. She also received the Shakharov Prize. In 2014 at age seventeen she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. She was awarded the National Youth Peace Prize in 2011, the Pride of Britain in 2013, and the Mother Theresa Memorial Award for Social Justice in 2012. These are only some of her many accomplishments.