International Women’s Day (IWD) was this past Sunday (8th March). I know I’ve been extremely busy lately but I don’t believe I live in that inacessible a hole as to not have come across any IWD communications! Correction: the hints I did receive were due to a subscription to a mailing list on HIV/AIDS and following Reuters Women on twitter. Why is it that a day that is relevant to HALF of the world’s population, should not have had more widespread coverage? Why weren’t there events taking place in every locality, making it impossible to ignore? One would have even expected the capitalist engine to be running on full blast, promoting this or that consumable in the same way that Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day and Christmas encourage. Is the attention given to IWD, symbolic of the vast amount of progress yet to be made in actualising gender equality?
Here are a few snippets and food for thought! Please share voices from around the world!
“Feminists across Europe demand a different approach than patch it up and go on with “business-as-usual.” A gendered analysis of our economies as based on both productive and reproductive work, and how this can and must be coupled with issues of equality, should together with sustainable development perspectives become center stage at a moment where we look for new models for the financial and economic systems.”
Brigitte Triems – president of the European Women’s Lobby
Check out their campaign: 50/50: No Modern European Democracy Without Gender Equality
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“I believe that International Women’s Day is an important reminder of the work that still needs to be done and it is certainly a powerful moment of solidarity across time and space … I want to reclaim the day. Reclaim it back from the hands of empty ritual and rhetoric and from those that treat it like another public relations opportunity.
As tax payers in the U.S. are aghast at upwards of $700 billion dollars going to “bail out” the financial system, little is said of the fact that this figure is also the approximate annual military budget of the U.S. Global military spending currently exceeds $1,204 billion dollars annually at 2006 prices. The combined budgets of the United Nations entities working on women’s issues amounts to approximately 0.005 percent of that.
The World Bank estimates the cost of interventions to promote gender equality under Millennium Development Goal 3 (universal access to education) to be $7-$13 per capita. The world’s military expenditure in 2006? $184 per capita. This is the financial crisis. That investing in weapons and war and creating human insecurity is prioritized over investing in peace, development and gender equality. This is what we should be questioning and working to change as we stand together on International Women’s Day. And if the governments and corporations of the world really want to show their support for this day, then ending militarism would be a good place to start.”
Sam Cook – director of the PeaceWomen Project
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“In Christian theology, it is axiomatic that God is neither male nor female. Yet persistently over history God has been normalised as male, and men have therefore been seen as closer to God than women.”
Reverend Dr. Miranda Threlfall-Holmes
(Image by Miranda Bergman)
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