Review: The Women Entrepreneurs of Impoverished Countries

She Rises Up manages to be inspirational without being sappy, like so many documentaries are.

Nearly a third of countries have laws that stifle a woman's access to work, including limits on bank accounts, property inheritance, and many types of jobs. These countries, not coincidentally, have some of the highest rates of poverty in the world. A new film from Maureen Castle Tusty and James Tusty's Sky Films, She Rises Up, tells the stories of three women who have overcome such obstacles to found businesses in retail, cosmetics, and textiles.

Documentaries intended to be inspirational—as this one clearly is—too often sloppily romanticize the lives of entrepreneurs in impoverished places or force their subjects into cookie-cutter storytelling templates. She Rises Up does neither, treating Gladys Yupanqui of Peru, Magatte Wade of Senegal, and Selyna Peiris of Sri Lanka as complex individuals with mixed motivations. The result yanks the heartstrings without being sappy.

Comments

[mad.casual]

not coincidentally

So, just to be clear, there are no impoverished countries where women have [checks notes] equal access to bank accounts, property inheritance, and many types of jobs *and* every country that’s not impoverished women have fully equal access to bank accounts, property inheritance, and many types of jobs?

Or is this a loose or even spurious correlation that you’re, not coincidentally, trying to cast as some manner of causation. Because, while I’d agree that keeping half the population out of the workforce does impoverish a nation, the idea that it exceptionally impoverishes a nation because you keep one sex or the other or both out at a 50% rate is itself pretty archaic sexist/magic-dirt/vagina-fairy thinking.