Satwat Rehman honoured with PhD for her dedication to equality and social justice.
Note* This piece was first published on the GCU Website
Satwat Rehman was honoured for her dedication to equality and social justice. With more than three decades of work in equalities, education, and economic development, she has championed the rights of single-parent families in Scotland. Her collaboration with Glasgow Caledonian University's Scottish Poverty and Inequality Research Unit has shaped impactful research and policy initiatives.
She told graduands: "When I began my journey, I could never have imagined that I would find myself here today, recognised for efforts to address the profound inequalities that persist in our society.
"What has driven me through my life, from my early teens, has been a desire to make a difference — to work with others towards a society where structures and systems do not pre-determine your outcomes and journey; where a young working-class girl of Pakistani origin is not laughed at for wanting change things for the better; where her father is not stuck in low paid work with no prospect of change and so he has no option but to relocate and start his own small business; where her mother is not regarded as unintelligent because she never went to school; or where her older brother is not regarded as not being academic because English is not his first language, and therefore he has 'no language" "It was when I made sense of these experiences and understood that these were not just one-off incidents experienced only by us, that the fire in me was ignited. Whatever I ended up doing, I knew then that I had to believe it would make a difference.
Inequality, in its many forms, is a pervasive force that divides us — whether by race, gender, income, or disability, it is built into the systems and structures of our society.
“Tackling inequality is not a task that can be completed in one lifetime or by any single individual."