We have just learned about two of the Princess of Asturias Awards.
Gloria Steinem (Toledo, Ohio, 87 years old), 2021 Communication and Humanities Prize. Amartya Sen (Santiniketan, India, 87 years old), 2021 Social Sciences Prize. They coincide not only in their age, but also that they are both iconic, fundamental figures that every great cause needs: inequality and poverty. The first, inspiring the struggle of women and a reference for the American feminist movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s. She was the author of one of the leading speeches of the feminist movement in the United States of the 20th century, during the founding of the Assembly National Women’s Policy: ‘Appeal to the women of America’. We have re-visualized their struggle in ‘Mrs. America ‘, a series that recalls the beginning of the fight for equal rights in the United States, and incidentally, the second wave of feminism.
By reading their statements you check their common accents. Thus, Gloria Steinem points out: “Today it is as important to attend to the division by gender as it is to poverty.” “We should guarantee access to technology, and education in it, because there are parts of the world where they still have nothing.” He highlighted how the future is marked by inequality, by breaking from the wage gap to the need for equal opportunities for boys and girls. “Those girls who are being born here and now where there is not yet equal access to education, or health, and in which no one is going to encourage her to be what she has no way of knowing what she will want to be. That girl is something unique, a miracle, as is any human being on this planet. I dedicate the Award to her, and to her future. “
Two of the winners this year with the Princess of Asturias Awards, Gloria
Steinem and Amartya Sen have in common the fight against inequality
A very dear friend, José Antonio Biescas, gave me Amartya Sen’s book: ‘Development and freedom. I was not surprised to read it because I saw how they both believed that economics and ethics should go hand in hand. Also from the need to move away from a merely technical conception, delving into other values traditionally far removed from the economy. Ideas that have created a school among human rights defenders, which include economic and social rights, not just political and civil rights. The United Nations Development Program, which more than three decades ago created, with Sen’s central contribution, the Human Development Index (HDI), which not only contains the quantification of production and services (gross domestic product ), but aspects such as life expectancies or citizens’ education. If not measured in this way, macroeconomic indicators will not necessarily show how the inhabitants of a country actually live.
I was shocked to learn his thesis that hunger is not a consequence of the lack of food but of inequalities in the distribution mechanisms of the same. The need for sustained economic growth requires that political and social reforms must precede economic reforms. For this Gordian knot between democracy and capitalism to work, both terms must be kept in a certain balance. For this reason he points out that: “Inequality and asymmetry of power have the potential to erode the advantages of democracy. And that is what we see now in India.” With the money raised from the Nobel Prize, she created the Pratichi Trust, helping literacy, basic health and gender equality in India and Bangladesh. It is not surprising since, in her work, the inequality suffered by women has been the object of special attention and her research has influenced the policies against extreme inequality designed in various international organizations for decades.
Today the great challenge is to work together for our survival as a species
However, after years of progress in that fight, the coronavirus pandemic has been a serious setback. In a recent report, the UN warned that the worst recession in 90 years had caused the loss of 114 million jobs and the expulsion of some 120 million people into extreme poverty. As a consequence of the pandemic, I think that a mental globalization has taken place, which calls us not to isolate ourselves, since all barriers have been knocked down. And taking up Sen’s concept of positive freedom, the real ability of a person to do something. We should stop thinking only about gender, race and class differences to think more about our survival as a species.
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