Despite having been excluded from the upper echelons of religious leadership in many traditions, women play a core part in religious communities. Women tend to attend religious rituals more regularly than men, and bring their male relations and spouses to these events. In more traditional societies, women facilitate community cohesion and assist the integration of […]
gender equality
International Women’s Day: Inspiring Freedom
By Stella Roos Peters 8 March 2020 was International Women’s Day, on which women made their voices heard around the world. Women and men around the world participated in protests, marches, and demonstrations calling for gender justice in all its forms. The topics at the forefront were equal pay, equal opportunity, holding gender violence accountable, […]
Gender Equality and Female Empowerment: A Dharmic Responsibility
By Sónia Gomes PhD Today is International Women’s Day, the day we celebrate the progress we’ve made so far and examine honestly how far we need to go. The very notion of gender equality entails the belief that injustice is associated with the concept’s very definition. It is imperative that we reflect deeply on this association. […]
A Conversation with Tenzin Palmo on Nuns and Challenging Sexism
In this extended discussion recorded on the spot by Sónia Gomes, Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo discusses important but often uncomfortable gender issues in Vajrayana, including the need to challenge engrained cultural sexism in monasteries and the plight of ordained Western women, who more often than not have no institutional, psychological, or moral support after becoming nuns. […]
Embodied Women
What does it mean to be a woman in the Buddhist tradition? To me, even a question as important as bhikkhuni ordination in the Theravada and Vajrayana schools is not as basic as the question of “the woman” in Buddhism. Nor am I convinced that gender is inconsequential to conventional Buddhist life just because gender […]