Beyoncé loves to write. In her latest essay — which is included in the Shriver Report: A Woman’s Nation Pushes Back from the Brink’ study, — the “Flawless” singer talks about gender equality and how it isn’t much of a reality yet. She starts her letter with some alarming statistics stating although women make up half of the work force, “the average working woman earns only 77 percent of what the average working man makes.”
She then calls out men and tell them that they need to speak up and “demand that their wives, daughters, mothers, and sisters earn more—commensurate with their qualifications and not their gender.”
Gender equality will only be achieved when both men and women work together to make it a reality. “Humanity requires both men and women, and we are equally important and need one another,” Beyoncé writes. “So why are we viewed as less than equal? These old attitudes are drilled into us from the very beginning. We have to teach our boys the rules of equality and respect, so that as they grow up, gender equality becomes a natural way of life. And we have to teach our girls that they can reach as high as humanly possible.”
Although there’s a lot of work to be done to achieve gender equality, Beyoncé believes that it will happen if we all work together.
Read the entire letter here.
