Energy: The surprising key to global women's empowerment

This International Women's Day, let's ditch political squabbles and instead focus on the power of affordable, reliable energy to liberate women in poverty.

March 8 is International Women’s Day, when the world celebrates the accomplishments of women and the value of living in a society that values both sexes equally.

Unfortunately, conversations around women’s empowerment and equality typically revolve around intensely political issues. This International Women's Day, let's ditch political squabbles and instead focus on the power of affordable, reliable energy to liberate women in poverty.

While we enjoy our comfortably electrified lives, pontificating on social media from our couches, it’s all too easy to forget that there are real men, women, and children just like us — people with families, hopes, and dreams just like us — suffering in dire poverty.

And the effect of energy poverty is especially harsh on women. Women and girls around the world collectively spend 200 million hours a day walking to collect water from rivers, averaging more than three miles round trip while carrying incredibly heavy loads and putting themselves at increased risk of sexual assault (not to mention medieval-sounding diseases like cholera and dysentery from unsanitary water that still kill half a million people every year). This long and arduous daily journey prevents many girls from attending school. It’s no wonder women’s literacy and access to electricity correlate so strongly.

And the benefits of access to energy don’t stop there. As a former colleague wrote in Fox News:

To make matters worse, three billion people worldwide lack access to safe cooking and heating fuels and are instead forced to burn wood, animal dung, kerosene, or coal. Girls in these households spend more than an hour every day collecting fuel, only to put themselves in more danger when they return home. Sadly, 3.8 million people die prematurely every year as a result of toxic pollutants released when these fuels are burned in closed quarters. Naturally, most are women and girls.

We are privileged that electricity is an everyday commodity in the United States, and one we often don’t think twice about as long as the lights turn on when we flick the switch. But electricity could offer so much more than light to women in impoverished countries. It offers the unprecedented opportunity to escape not just physical and financial poverty, but also the poverty of time that too often prevents women from improving their lives.

A study in Guatemala found that electrification reduced the amount of time women spent cooking by 34 percent, allowing them to invest more time in education, pursuing meaningful work, and civic engagement — activities that are critical to women’s political and social equality. With better education and meaningful, life-giving work, women in any community have the opportunity to truly shape their futures and their daughters’ futures.

What a shame that, in between trumpeting his concern for equality and equity, President Biden has banned financing of fossil fuel projects in developing countries. No move could provide greater hope and opportunity for women around the world.