Came, Saw, Scored: Young Women Against Old Stereotypes
The uncertainty of the sea or the road adventure, the joy of play or discovery are rarely thought of as a woman’s realm. In the rural areas of Armenia, especially, women are too busy caring for their children and attending to domestic affairs to play recreational sports, think of a startup, organise an exhibition of their work or travel across the world for a conference. A lot of these patterns that guide their lives form in adolescence and young adulthood in an environment lacking in opportunities to deviate, explore, and have fun before committing to life-long promises and obligations. While caring mostly for family and children women living in rural Armenia may also want to aspire for other, even seemingly unconventional, pursuits of life.
But what if it were otherwise? What if they formed a healthy skepticism about the way the majority of their community thinks, finding out first hand that what you thought you couldn’t do was always well within reach, just waiting for your diligence and effort? The EU-funded programme “Bridge for CSOs” implemented by Armenian General Benevolent Union (AGBU) aims at strengthening the civil society. It has done significant work in ensuring young girls from rural communities know that the ancient proverb was right: “…a soldier needs a war, a merchant – money, a woman – all the world.”
Committing to Goals
GOALS NGO was founded by Zach Theiler and Victoria Dokken, who were both Peace Corps volunteers in Armenia when they decided they wanted to – quite literally, in a sense, – level the playing field of opportunity for boys and girls in many ways, but especially in football. In fact, Zach’s initial attempt at starting a girls’ soccer team in a small village in Goris failed because there was no coach willing to work with the girls. Then he met other people who were interested in the idea from neighboring villages, and in March 2016 the first girls’ football league in Goris was created.
“What started as a project grew into an organisation,” says Victoria Dokken, the co-founder of GOALS. “Now we have branched out: we do summer camps, we have four girls leagues in different regions of Armenia, and we do a lot of social impact work. We organise training sessions that use sports, interactive games to talk about social issues, such as human rights, women’s rights, conflict resolution, etc. People who learn from these training sessions how to use these games hold after-school clubs in their local communities for the local youth. Right now we have fifteen such clubs.”
When asked about the differences they see in participants, Victoria says that the girls become more self-confident, outspoken, better at decision-making and leadership – all benefits as described by international research on the impact of soccer.
“But also,” she adds, “the parents and coaches say they have changed beliefs about young women being able to play football at the same level as men. Sometimes at first parents are hesitant, because they think their daughter will get hurt or she’ll be “manly,” but they come to change their minds.”
Once during a mixed gender football summer camp, GOALS saw the stereotype break in the course of one evening. Boys were initially reluctant to choose girls as teammates because they assumed the latter could not run as fast or play as well. They became eager to have the girls in their teams after seeing them play.
The organisation has a team down in Goris made up of all the best players in the league that now plays with the Football Federation in Yerevan. About four of the players were recently even offered to play on the national team. Now GOALs is working on creating more teams and on getting the federation to recruit girls from other regions as well. In fact, the inclusive, team-oriented, and undemanding about equipment nature of football is a reason why Victoria chose it, other than she grew up playing it, of course.
“Having lived in the region,” Dokken says, “Zach and I both have seen the impact of these gender stereotypes and gender norms is much more severe there. Early marriage and not pursuing a career are prevalent among girls, who choose to be housewives, despite being highly educated. I’m not saying it’s good or bad, it’s just common, it’s an existing gender norm. When you grow up in a society that has certain expectations about you, you expect the same from yourself as well. You hear something enough, you see it around, and you believe that. So, we’re trying to send other messages and show other examples.”
Supported by “Bridge for CSOs” programme, GOALS also aims to bridge the perceived divide between Armenians living in Armenia and the Diaspora. David Dikranian, who was a coaching assistant at Yale University for many years, came to Armenia for the first time to volunteer for a GOALS summer camp. In response to the common “How was it?” he replies:
“I fell in love with it.”
He is planning on coming back in December. Dikranian mentions how generous and thankful the girls were and how they poured water on him – a sign of trust and respect between a coach and an athlete. The experience has inspired him to start his own girls’ football club in Yerevan.
“My impression is that the gender difference in terms of the number opportunities are little by little changing in Armenia, and I want to be a small part of that change,” he says.
The Challenge of Technology
As GOALS showed, the physical capabilities and social change are closely interconnected, but BRIDGE programme also works to bridge Armenia and the rest of the world, intellectual effort and social reform, people with disabilities and people without.
A team from Karbi in Aragatsotn region in Armenia won People’s Choice Award at the Global Technovation Challenge 2017, an international competition where girls create a mobile app to solve an issue they see in their community. The team of four girls named “One Step Ahead” created an Android sign language app in both English and Armenian and then travelled to San Francisco, the world capital of IT, to present it along with their business plan. Accompanied with colourful illustrations and videos, the app is going to be developed further with the help of USD 10.000 that the team won the competition and will be placed in Google Play Market for free.
The team got inspired to create this app solution after first-handily discovering the need. One of their peers had a visiting relative with hearing impairment. Nobody in the community had the skill or knowledge of sign language to communicate. Thus, the girls got the motivation to make a breakthrough – with a one step forward in creating the android application.
“This challenge played an important role for me especially,” says one of the team members. “I’m a future computer scientist because I realised how comfortable I feel in this field.”
“Women and Information Society” NGO, the organisation that brought the annual Technovation Challenge to Armenia, aims to contribute to the integration of Armenian girls and women into the Information and Communications Technology (ICT) sector that now has a 1:7 ratio of men to women internationally and 1:2 in Armenia. The dedicated educators across the country, some of whom have to learn coding from scratch, then teach their students and this achievement of the girls from Karbi show the rich multi-faceted potential of Armenia’s women in the emerging and globally equalising field of Information Technologies.
The EU-funded “Bridge for CSOs” implemented by AGBU has partnered with a number of representatives of the civil society in Armenia to prove that whether on the field or in front of a screen, girls and women are capable of remarkable achievements and dreams that break the set trajectory of gender stereotypes. It is a shared societal responsibility to equalise the opportunities and realise that potential for a more fascinating and fairer future.