#womenslives

People were welcoming, but they were surprised, when a team of modestly dressed women surfers showed up in a remote corner of Iran. They had never seen surfing before. “Because we were only women in the water, they thought it was a sport for women,” says French director Marion Poizeau. “So the men asked us if they could also do it.”

Photographer Keiko Hiromi recently documented grassroots efforts by Liberian NGOs to fight Ebola and the stigma impacting survivors.

Twenty years ago, the Beijing International Conference on Women reviewed the research and declared that raising the status of women was a linchpin for global development. Join PRI’s The World as we explore how far we’ve come and what it means to combat gender inequality in our Across Women’s Lives coverage.

She survived Haiti’s quake. Her neighbor did not. The blood and dust of that disaster bound together an American anthropologist and her neighbor’s niece in ways they did not imagine.