PARIS: Marches, protests, strikes and studies — people around the globe are taking action to mark International Women’s Day and to strive for efforts to obtain equality. Across Spain, women downed tools on Friday in a strike for equality, a mass movement which drew in female employees from across the spectrum, from nuns to journalists and even the mayor of Madrid, Manuela Carmena.
In Manila, about 4,000 demonstrators marched through the city chanting slogans against President Rodrigo Duterte, who has repeatedly made jokes about women.
In Pyongyang, Flower Shop No 5 is doing a brisk trade in flowers on International Women’s Day, which is a full public holiday in North Korea, as a steady stream of customers turn up to buy blooms for their wives, mothers and significant others.
As the North’s founder Kim Il Sung once said: “In our country, women are in charge of one of the wheels of the revolution”.
In Moscow, President Vladimir Putin saddled up for a canter with women police officers on horseback.
France awarded the first Simone Veil Prize to Aissa Doumara Ngatansou, a Cameroonian woman who has spent 20 years helping victims of abuse and forced marriages.
On receiving the 100,000-euro prize ($112,000) Doumara dedicated it to “all women victims of violence and forced marriages” and to those who had escaped the clutches of Boko Haram in Nigeria.
Pope Francis praised women as the source of peace, hailing their contribution to building a world “that can be a home for all”.
“Women make the world beautiful, they protect it and keep it alive. They bring the grace of renewal, the embrace of inclusion, and the courage to give of oneself,” he said.
— AFP
“Peace, then, is born of women, it arises and is rekindled by the tenderness of mothers. Thus the dream of peace becomes a reality when we look towards women... If we dream of a future peace, we need to give space to women.”
DO MORE AT HOME, UN TELLS MEN
Of all the factors blocking equality in employment, the biggest is the heavy burden of caregiving borne by women, a UN report has found, saying the pace of change will only change if men take on far more unpaid tasks at home.
“In the last 20 years, the amount of time women spent on unpaid care and domestic work has hardly fallen, and men’s has increased by just eight minutes a day,” said Manuela Tomei of the UN’s International Labour Organization.
Globally, women perform more than three-quarters of the total time spent on unpaid care work, averaging four hours and 25 minutes per day, while men only do one hour and 23 minutes.
“The imbalanced division of work within the household between men and women is one of the most resilient features of gender inequality,” the report said.
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