Women are constantly breaking down barriers, confronting stereotypes and double standards and facing gender bias, and for every obstacle that is crossed, another looms behind it. The sheer determination and power it takes to continue to pursue what seems like an endless onslaught of problems resulting from a society constructed against us, proves that women have what it takes to drive change. As young women with little authority it can seem like a hopeless endeavour, a leering tower of people and constructs trying to prevent you from enacting any change. Especially in a rural community, where everything seems disconnected and outdated.

At first I truly believed that making a difference was harder in a rural community, or a small town. Everything happens the way it’s always happened, the societal advancements take longer and have a smaller impact, and every minuscule obstacle feels designed to personally prevent your success. How am I supposed to drive change when I have no power and no connections to larger society to make an impact? But something I’ve grown to realise, with the help of the powerful role models in my life, is that rural communities provide an advantage to enacting change.

As much as we will it too, large scale change doesn’t happen all at once, and isn’t driven by a single person. Smaller communities allow for small changes to be made, to tackle one small part of the problem at a time, and to find others to fight for change alongside you. A large part of promoting change is finding other women to support you and whom you can support. Women supporting women is what accelerates change. Smaller communities allow you to cause ripples, which grow and spread until we are able to break down the gender barriers preventing equality. The idea of driving change is daunting, and to face such a barrier you must first find a reason to be doing what you are doing.

The key part of driving change is figuring out what drives you. As women in rural communities, we have a responsibility to ourselves and to young women everywhere to take the opportunities that we are presented with to cause change in first our communities, and then the world. One of the biggest ways for women to enact change is to diversify the workforce, which provides many benefits to the world and the economy by increasing creativity, perspectives and problem solving. Women in rural communities are in a unique position to increase diversity in the workplace, starting in small town businesses and mining companies and working up, towards higher positions and larger scale change and permanently increasing the number of women and minorities in the workforce. This allows them to work upwards and prove the value of having women charge, hopefully resulting in an increase in female leaders, demonstrating how small scale change can result in large scale impact and displaying the importance of rural women in driving change.