Bono is calling out his male counterparts for not stepping up to help women fix inequality issues.
The U2 frontman felt compelled to take the hot topic to the next level after he was the only man honoured at Glamour magazine’s Woman of the Year awards in 2017, explaining the honour started a conversation in his household with his wife and two daughters about the serious issues all females face.
“I was aware and I was glad that I was being offered up as a firestarter for a debate the magazine rightly wanted to have about the role of men in the fight for gender equality,” he writes in a Time magazine opinion piece.
“It seemed obvious to me that the sex who created the problem might have some responsibility for undoing it. Men can’t step back and leave it to women alone to clean up the mess we’ve made and are still making. Misogyny, violence and poverty are problems we can’t solve at half-strength, which is the way we’ve been operating for a few millennia now.”
And Bono believes education is the way to help women move forward and provide future generations with a jump-start on life.
“Because the research is clear – it’s plain on the page and has been proved on the ground – that funding girls’ education isn’t charity but investment, and the returns are transformational,” he adds.
As the 57-year-old continues to learn about how he can help, he is calling on men to look to their female counterparts for a solution.
“The key lesson in my own home-schooling is something (my wife) Ali has been saying to me since we were teenagers: don’t look down on me, but don’t look up to me, either,” he continues. “Look across to me. I’m here. It just may be that in these times, the most important thing for men and women to do is to look across to each other – and then start moving, together, in the same direction.
“Making education a priority is a way of making equality a priority, and even men with limited vision should see that’s the only way forward.”