Exploring HeForShe Campaign: Social Movement for Gender Equality

This essay examines the HeForShe campaign, a social media movement launched by Emma Watson in 2014 to advocate for gender equality. The campaign aimed to address gender inequality's mental, social, economic, and political impacts, emphasizing equal rights for women in a male-dominated society. The movement influenced companies to adopt equal pay standards, addressed women's economic empowerment through initiatives like Malawi's law against child marriage, and combatted violence against women through university programs. The UK's University of Leicester's commitment to increase female faculty and develop mentorship programs exemplifies the campaign's impact on encouraging future generations. Overall, the HeForShe movement brought significant changes by promoting gender equality in the workplace, economic empowerment, and safety for women.

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5/13/2019

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This essay discusses about HeForShe movement a social media campaign which was
started by Emma Watson on 20th September 2014. This movement fought for gender equality
and how women should get equal rights as men in a male dominant society. Gender equality
is something that impacts a country and an individual as well. This movement had impact
on the whole country and it also impact the country in various positive ways as it changed the
way people thought about women, government launched programs to help women and even
universities encouraged women (MAHARANI HEMAS, 2016).
The Hashtag campaign that I chose for the assignment is Hashtag HeForShe
movement, it is a solidarity campaign which was started in United Nations for the gender
equality and the goal of this movement was to achieve equality by encouraging all the
genders and the changing the actions against all the behaviors and the stereotypes (Okech,
2017).
A special event was held in order to start the Hashtag HeForShe movement cam pain,
it started on 20th September 2014 at the headquarters of United Nations by Emma Watson,
she gave a speech about her journey about feminism and how gender equality is important in
the world and it all started when her speech was circulated on social media making it a social
media campaign (Women, 2014)
This campaign is important because Gender inequality is an issue that affects all the
people mentally, socially, economically and politically. It is a struggle faced by women every
day in a male dominant society. Even in 2018, some people still do not treat women equal to
men.
I chose to talk about this campaign because I strongly believe that gender equality is
really important in today’s world. Gender inequality is something that not only impacts an
individual but the whole economy of the country. Women should be treated equal to men in

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every field be it anything I would like to pay an active part in the campaign in the future to
help the women fight for their rights (Setiawan, 2015).
This movement can impact the thoughts and actions of people by a lot of ways, after
this movement took place a lot of companies understood the importance of equality at
workplace as after the campaign more women were leaving the company than the male a lot
of companies broke and it was also found out that the male were leaving in order to support
the women and thus companies had to change the way of thinking and had to employ women
and men at the same rate (Henry-White, 2015).
Apart from this another thing in which the campaign helped in was that the after the
campaign the company developed an equal pay standard system which is to be followed by
all the companies, the rule was passed that all the companies have to pay equal to men and
women
The campaign also helped in changing the economic empowerment of women, in
command to overcome the absence of women contributing to the economy, Malawi made a
law against child marriage in the 2015. The government also took steps to educate the
women.
Next thing in which the movement helped in was ending violence against the women,
according to various studies it was found that women were physically and sexually assaulted
in a lot of places and mostly it was in college campuses, for this a programme was launched
by a lot of universities which educated the people to be safe in such situation.
Lastly, this movement helped in encoring the coming or the next generation. One of
the main contributions in the HeForShe movement was by UK's university of Leicester which

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promised and pledged to make their professors and staff 30% female by the 2020
(Batterson, 2016).
Apart from this the university also developed mentoring, leadership and coaching
programs to expose students to the female role models.
This essay is about a social media Hashtag campaign named “HeForShe” it was
started in by Emma Watson and it is about equality of genders. Equality of genders is
important in today’s world. Even women should be allowed to live equal to men. This
Hashtag movement brought various changes in the society which were Encouraging the next
generation, Ending violence against women, Transforming women's economic
empowerment, closing the gender pay gap, moving towards equality in a workplace.

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References
Batterson, C. (2016). " Feminism" and Feminism: A Rhetorical Criticism of Emma Watson's
Address to the UN. Quest: A Journal of Undergraduate Research, 5, 1-12.
Henry-White, J. (2015). Gender Equality?: A Transnational Feminist Analysis of the UN
HeForShe Campaign as a Global" Solidarity" Movement for Men (Doctoral
dissertation, University of Missouri--Columbia).
MAHARANI HEMAS, S. E. L. A. (2016). TRANSITIVITY AND IDEOLOGY IN EMMA
WATSON’S SPEECH FOR THE HEFORSHE CAMPAIGN (CRITICAL
DISCOURSE ANALYSIS). Language Horizon, 4(2).
Okech, A. (2017). On Feminist Futures and Movement Imperatives. Development, 60(1-2),
12-17.
Setiawan, T. D. (2015). A PRAGMATIC ANALYSIS OF EMMA WATSON’S
HEFORSHE.
Women, U. N. (2014). HeForShe: UN Women solidarity movement for gender equality
action kit. New York: UN Women.

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