Women Who Dare To Bicycle In Pakistan

The Iron Dames is one of just three all-female professional racing teams that competes in Grand Touring endurance racing around the world. The group was founded to change the perception of women in the sport and they have successfully shifted attitudes by qualifying for the sport’s top races. While getting sponsorships can be difficult for women in the field, the Iron Dames have received endorsements from top car manufacturers, which further reinforces the legitimacy of their talent and is a sign of their progress in the male-dominated sport.

Coaches and players around the world are using sports to teach boys about masculinity and the importance of integrity, both on and off the field. From cricket in India to rugby in Fiji, games are used as a foundation for teaching important life lessons and values. As a result, young men participating in these programs have been found less likely to show aggression and more likely to believe abuse against women is wrong.

In Rwanda, women are breaking gender stereotypes by playing soccer. After the Rwandan genocide of 1994, Felicite Rwemarika used her own money to fund the organization Women in Sport. Since then, it’s helped women process their trauma, and challenge traditional gender roles in the country.

An all-girls football team is challenging gender stereotypes and empowering their teenage players in the process. An international NGO named Magic Bus teamed up with a Mumbai-based women's collective named Parcham to find girls and parents willing to participate. After a slow start, the group now has a healthy number of players who are also both Muslim and Hindu. The process of becoming confident taking up public space and the fight to claim their spot back from the boys have given the girls more confidence, and parents are now highly supportive of their daughters.

Yuwa is a nonprofit organization that draws girls into education through sport, giving them the opportunity to play football while also providing high-quality instruction and skills training. The program serves about 600 students and has seen participants go on to study at universities, pursue coaching careers, and even play in the national football federation.

Once again the bicycle is playing a part in empowering women! In this case, several organizations across the United States are using mountain biking to build preteen and teenage girls' confidence and drive. The dedication and strength that this adventure sport requires disrupts constraining gender roles for girls at a critical time in their development, and programs across the country seem to be growing in popularity quickly.

Focused on the idea of honor and honor killings, activist Khalida Brohi started a program that provides rural women in Pakistan career skills and an income in order to fight the pervasive cultural attitudes about women's education. Brohi has been working for this cause for over a decade now and has done a number of different initiatives along the way. In this episode she shares some of her insights from her work, such as working with the women themselves to change social attitudes rather than the men, or broaching the topic for both men and women using the language of Islam.

The Primate’s World Relief and Development Fund (PWRDF) is working to implement maternal and newborn child health programs in East Africa. Though the project has incorporated a wide-range of initiatives, many of them have relied on a single underlying principle that has proven to be effective: the empowerment of local women.

Obesity has become a health crisis for many women in the African-American community, but a group known as GirlTrek is working to change this by making exercise a social norm and creating supportive connections between women with shared goals. This new organization, which works to identify barriers that many in this community face, channels African-American history to encourage black women to walk their way toward better health.

The nonprofit Action Northeast Trust organizes youth ultimate Frisbee matches to strengthen social cohesion, promote gender equality, and foster peace among young people from different villages, ethnicities, and mother tongues in Assam, India.