8th March!
Having its primary origin in United States of America, the socialist and communist movement for gender equality soon spread all over Europe and Russia in the beginning of nineteenth century. Later, with a mission to bring gender equality in the society, 8th March was denoted as an International Women’s day in a chain of nations. Gender equality was then explained by the terms of equal pay, equal economic opportunity, equal legal rights, reproductive rights, subsidized child care, and the prevention of violence against women. Today, after so many years, how far have we progressed towards the aim?
Equality of pay: Are women, having similar skills, paid equally as men? A few days back, I went through a nationwide survey in a developed country on gender equality in the work place. The first point they addressed was the salary negotiation. Women are still less paid and are poor negotiators when it comes to salary.
Equal economic opportunity: From my experience, it’s mostly No, because it gets related to which stage of life the woman is placed at. For example a single woman often gets higher priority because she doesn’t have family binding, again married women are given higher priorities as they seem to be more settled and not likely to explore better career opportunities in other places. So here the deterministic factor is a woman’s marrital status which is hardly the case for a man.
Equal legal rights: Well, I may be harsh, but to me the truth is again a “No”, but from the flipped side. Once there was gender discriminating law all over the world, but then to balance that, recent laws and affairs have been made more women centric. This leads to gender inequality as well.
Reproductive rights: It’s still a challenge for developing countries.
Subsidized child care: Progressing all over.
Prevention of violence: What does violence mean in today’s world? If it is Physical torture- it’s still documented in many countries irrespective of socio-economic status. Mental abuse – How many of us do really know what mental abuse is? Even if we know, how many truly train ourselves to consider it as an offense? Starting from bullying to sexual jokes to body shaming to doubting one’s ability to demoralising someone, all are some kind of mental abuses. So definitely we haven’t progressed much! !
Now I come to my own point of view…
Gender and sex are different. Sex is an anatomical orientation, driven by one’s chromosomal arrangement and determined even before birth while gender is shaped gradually by multidimensional interaction of genes, hormones, environment and many more. I strongly believe that gender has no binary identity and can be placed at any position on a 7 point likert scale as similar to picking any colour from a rainbow. Then why do we need to celebrate a day for women, a day for men, a day for LGBTA? Are we really different? When we are happy, do we smile differently? Do our tears differ when we are in deep grief? Definitely we have our own uniqueness, we identify certain people to be of our types, but is this self seeking behaviour always related to gender? I agree that the physiology of a woman, man and someone from LGBTQ are different, so at times, I may get a better compassion from my niche group. But is there anyone in the world who can exactly feel the way I feel? No, never, thoughts and feelings are very dynamic and individualistic, one can come closest to mine, but cannot experience the same. Then why do we need to categorise ourselves to a particular group? Why don’t we say that we are all human beings and that’s our only identity? Why don’t we value ourselves as individuals!
But, if I only say this, I really devalue the existence of inequality. I think, we should be aware of implementing gender equality since the very first time a child asks about gender. To me, gender discrimination is more of a mental set back(making a social issue), than laws to be set into action.
Today’s modern concept of women empowerment…
Do we really expect one day to be acknowledged for what we do?
Do we really want to be the headline of a newspaper for doing something which is only appreciated as an achievement just because we are women and not because of the merit of the work itself?
Don’t we feel underpowered when we notice that women are still used as commercial commodities (70% of product advertisements still encash women as a pound of flesh). Why do we need only women cheerleaders? Is there any protest against that?
When we celebrate women’s day with a big grandeur, do we really think about what happens to women of rural areas, poor countries? How are they suffering? What’s their struggle story? No, we don’t associate ourselves with the worldwide women group, but we feel proud being a woman. We also raise our voice for equality in a privileged circle where inequality prevails at larger horizons.
To me, celebrating women’s day is the biggest discrimination! I don’t think that I need a special day to be thanked, admired or specially cared for just being a woman. I do my duties, you do yours, we thank each other and we move on.
#8thmarch #8thmarch2024 #19November #25JUNE #InternationalWomenDay #lgbtqday #intenationalmenday #humanity #respectforall #individuality #humanrights #genderequality #GenderEqualityNow #GenderEqualityMatters #treatmeasanindividual
