Winning Essays

She looked up and her expression changed. Her nose scrunched up, her eyebrows pulled together, her lip began to tremble, and her eyes glistened as the tears swelled. She looked down. "He said I didn't get the job." she said. My grandma answered her silent cry. “Aw, Habibti." My love. The sweet smell of mint tea and the vivid colors of our traditional Moroccan couch suddenly faded. I observed silently as the scene unfolded beside me: the hand holding, the words of sympathy and the weak explanation took place just as they had the previous few times. It was all too familiar. It wasn’t the first time a woman was told she couldn't pursue her career. 

According to studies, 65% of Egyptian girls and women over the age of 9 are illiterate.  "Two million women in Egypt have never attended school; furthermore, the number of girls  outside the educational system is twice that of boys," says Malak Zaalouk, director of the Middle  East Institute at the American University in Cairo. To put it another way illiteracy represents one  of the most significant challenges that Egyptian women face. 

Nothing embodies the rags to riches trope like Singapore. In a few decades, our grandparents turned a tiny fishing village into one of the richest, safest and most productive countries on Earth. Our grandmothers pushed through countless obstacles in both the roles of a worker and a caregiver amidst poverty and the ubiquitous shadow of sexism, with their indomitable spirit living on in their daughters and granddaughters to this day. As such, women are not just expected to succeed, but also to excel. We call this mindset “kiasu” in Singlish, the Singaporean zeitgeist: an endless desire to strive for more to avoid falling short. In a city where sleep is simply a setting on a computer, Singaporean women face the unique challenge to perform at maximum efficacy in everything expected of them without weakness. 

The journey of pregnancy should be one of elation, excitement, and exhilaration as a mother awaits the arrival of her newborn. It has no place for a company’s influence, where many view pregnant employees as a trammel to be cut off. Unfortunately in Singapore, pregnancy discrimination in workplaces continues to be a plague that impedes women’s progress in their careers. 

“I'm so sick of running as fast as I can, wondering if I'd get there quicker if I was a man.” These are two lines from Taylor Swift’s The Man. Now you may be asking, “is Taylor even Filipina?” Well no, but these lines from her song perfectly encapsulates what it is to be a woman regardless of where you live. Being a woman has always been a struggle, moreso in a conservative country like the Philippines. Facing countless inequalities on a daily basis, women have to work twice as hard to be leveled with men. 

A woman is to live for everyone but herself. By the Philippines’ standards, a woman can only ever be a virgin, a victim, a slut, a wife, or a mother. The timeline of her life starts and ends with her belonging to someone else. 

Known as the home of the Black Nazarene, a life-sized image of Christ believed to hold miraculous healing powers, the Quiapo Church is often infested by swarms of devout Roman Catholic citizens. However, for many young Filipino women, the true life-saving miracle they desperately search for lies amongst the bustling grounds surrounding the church - the hotspot of lurking vendors offering various illegal abortion medications and practices. 

I became scared of eating when I was 14 years old. My favorite color was emerald green, my favorite song Clarity, and my favorite hobby counting. Steps, pounds, calories—it was an ever-constant cycle of adding and subtracting the untouchable things reaching out to strangle me.I suppose this was a selective pastime; I didn’t count the falling strands of hair in my hairbrush each night, or how many seconds it took for the black and blue fireworks in my mind to dizzy themselves to stability when I would stand, or how many times I lied to my parents,“I’ve already eaten,” without thinking twice. When I was 14,I was a child. When I was 14,I was a woman, because 7,000,000 women in the United States of America have eating disorders, and without treatment, 20% of those women do not survive. Women are being killed, and everyone is to blame. 

It is an unfortunate reality that women of the Philippines still suffer from innumerable issues, so many that it is nigh impossible to write about them in a single essay alone. To eradicate them would require a change in people’s dispositions, especially men, and a complete restructuring of our system. So many of these problems have become so ingrained in our society and norms, that it is of the utmost importance we draw attention to them to begin picking these threads out of the woven tapestry of Filipino culture. Perhaps the largest of these issues is that of reproductive health and the access to contraceptives. 

Whispers of an unmarried woman in her forties slither down the grapevine, and the room erupts in pity. She had exhibited a striking talent, beauty, and brilliance from childhood, yet what a shame her life has become. It is with great sorrow that the community sympathizes with the misguidance of her scholarly education, the scandal of her successful career, and her crime of a pursued dream. She is too arrogant, a recluse, and ever-so conceited; it is of little surprise she could not secure a husband. She is my aunt, and she is my teacher, and she is my neighbor; my parents worry she would forever lead a hollow life. She is a stranger, she is a Filipino, and she is a failure. 

I once had a barbie doll, and never thought I’d be one too. 

One humid morning amidst the ever-bustling streets of Manila, my older sister and I were running, hoping to catch the last jeepney with the route passing by our house. As we climbed up in the jeepney, I stealthily made my way to a vacant space while holding my above-the-knees jumper skirt down...