8th of March, International Women’s Day

On this week, a couple of days after the 8th of March, we reclaim, as every year, the equality between women and men. On 2021, International Women’s Day has been different. The COVID pandemic has made the big demonstrations we have seen during the last years impossible.

Celebrating advances and working towards achieving pending challenges

Even though this is an every day task, which the whole society needs to be compromised with, every 8th of March is a day that encourages everyone to make a special reflection. What have we achieved? And most importantly: what do we have to achieve from now on?

It’s important to highlight the achievements gained during the last years towards a real equality between women and men. There have never been so many laws on a worldwide scale to regulate gender equality as in this moment. Girls school attendance has kept growing around the world during the last decades. And maternal mortality has decreased a 38% between the years 2000 and 2017.

That said, many more relevant inequalities haven’t been eliminated yet. Gender violence is still a sad reality that has the murder of many women as a consequence in our country and around the globe. Only 2 out of every 5 women suffering from it seek help of any kind (which means there is a big distrust in justice systems and that they don’t believe their terrible situations can change). Women earn 16% less than men worldwide. And only 1 out of every 4 managers are women. Besides, young women have 25% more chances of suffering extreme poverty than young men.

The Fifth Sustainable Development Goal marked by Agenda 2030 is about Gender Equality. To reduce and one day eradicate all the injustices that women suffer and to build peaceful and sustainable societies, the active search of that equality is the only possible way.

COVID-19, a challenge for everybody but especially for women

The pandemic has affected the whole globe more than any other disease or crisis during the last decades has. Almost the whole world’s population has suffered and still suffers its consequences. Because of this and because all of us have some responsibility in the situation to improve, unity is the optimal way for this dramatic situation to end. But when it comes to the pandemic, there are also differences.

In an unequal world, structural differences end up affecting every area. Also when it comes to the consequences that COVID is having for the world’s population since around a year ago. Women are the 70% of the global healthcare personal (and only a 25% of managers in the field); care and other non-paid tasks, especially domestic ones, occupy 4,1 hours a day for women and just 1,7 hours for men; moreover, millions of women have seen themselves locked up with their aggressors as a consequence of quarantine.

The leadership of national governments in countries as Denmark, Ethiopia, Finland, Germany, Iceland, New Zealand or Slovakia, all of them ruled by women, has been recognized internationally when it comes to the management of the pandemic. Curiously, though, only 20 women are heads of state in the world. Another evidence that the way towards the directive positions is not as easy for women as it is for men.

New Tandem supports the reclaims and celebrates the achievements

From New Tandem we want, in this week after International Women’s Day, to ask for the whole society to keep working towards an equality that despite seeming closer, it’s still far from being real. Ending as a society with gender and sexual violence, split up in a more equal way all care and domestic tasks between women and men, fighting to reduce the salary and labor gap between genders, and protecting women from poverty and precariousness, are the big challenges that we have to face in the next years. So, someday, 8th of March will be a celebration day. And equality will be normality, not an exception.