A key feature of 2017’s International Women’s Day is the call for “a day without women” – for women to take the day off work (paid and unpaid, at home and out of the home); to avoid shopping for the day, “with exceptions for small, women- and minority-owned businesses”; to wear red in solidarity.
In America, the call to strike has been led by the organisers of the Women’s March, which took place across the US (and the world) the day after Trump’s inauguration.
The idea is to mobilize women, including trans women, and all who support them in an international day of struggle – a day of striking, marching, blocking roads, bridges, and squares, abstaining from domestic, care and sex work, boycotting, calling out misogynistic politicians and companies, striking in educational institutions. These actions are aimed at making visible the needs and aspirations of those whom lean-in feminism ignored: women in the formal labor market, women working in the sphere of social reproduction and care, and unemployed and precarious working women.
In embracing a feminism for the 99%, we take inspiration from the Argentinian coalition Ni Una Menos. Violence against women, as they define it, has many facets: it is domestic violence, but also the violence of the market, of debt, of capitalist property relations, and of the state; the violence of discriminatory policies against lesbian, trans and queer women; the violence of state criminalization of migratory movements; the violence of mass incarceration; and the institutional violence against women’s bodies through abortion bans and lack of access to free healthcare and free abortion.
But Guardian columnist Lindy West, speaking on Australian TV this week, while agreeing that “protest is most effective when it disrupts people’s lives”, echoed concerns of others who are cautious about the proposed strike:
It would be tremendously effective if we could mobilise every single woman in the world …
A concern for me, as a very privileged, financially stable white woman who works from home … it’s very easy for me to say yes, everyone should go on strike but I want to be very cognisant of the fact there are very many women who cannot afford to lose one day’s worth of pay, let alone risk their job.
You can find details of strikes and other protests taking place around the world from Australia to Uruguay via the links on this page.
Today, Margaret Carey – director of an early childhood centre in Sydney, Australia – is striking for the first time ever. She explains why:
Women are an essential part of society. We hold together the household. We hold together the family. We care for our partners (though in a genuine relationship it is certainly not a one-way street). We care for our children. We care for others’ children. We care for our parents as they grow older. And we fill the jobs equated with caring. In my sector, 97% of us are women.
It is not because the work we do has no value. It is because the work we do has an intrinsic female association. ‘Care’ in any role should not be seen as of little value. If anything, it should be seen as value-adding to the role. Look at aged care workers, educators, nurses, teachers, social workers, psychologists, therapists, tutors, doctors. None of these professions are seen only as caring, but care is understood as intrinsic to their role.
But it is we in early childhood who forever need to point out that we are the same: we do caring but our whole job is far more than that.
I am walking off because I want the government and society to recognise that an early childhood educator is a professional role and one that must be given its deserved status. The first real step, a big step, in this direction is to receive professional wages, not 20 patronising dollars an hour.
If you’d like to hear more about how International Men’s Day is on 19 November, can I suggest you follow comedian Richard Herring on Twitter, as he endures his annual feat of replying to all the people wondering when International Men’s Day is.
International Women’s Day is on 8 March: 24 hours (of the 8,760 annually available) set aside to celebrate women and all of their achievements. And people get furious about it.
Surely, you might think, you could only be cross about it because that definitely isn’t enough time to celebrate the achievements of over than 50% of the population. But no …
So for the last two International Women’s Days I have tried to highlight this stupidity. I have got up early, logged on to Twitter and searched for the phrase “international men’s day”, found every single person who has tweeted the question and responded to them all individually: “It’s 19 November.”
There are thousands to get through. It goes on relentlessly, for hours and hours, but I try to get to them all because to see the same moronic question asked over and over again by people (who don’t even think just to check Google to make sure they’re not making an arse of themselves) is very funny, and shows exactly why an international women’s day is necessary.
Incidentally, nobody tweets me back to say: “Oh thanks for the information. I was wondering when it was.” Almost like they don’t want to know the answer to their own question.
My hope is that if I can spend a day a year dealing with this issue, then that means that everyone else can get on with making International Women’s Day about celebrating women and not complaining about the supposed raw deal men get. So I let men know that they do have a day if they want to celebrate themselves. Though not many of them do when it comes along, weirdly.
Incorrect assumptions are still being made that gender equality has been achieved, despite disturbing and comprehensive evidence to the contrary, an investigation by Australia’s sex discrimination commissioner, Kate Jenkins, has found.
Her findings include the experiences of more than 1,000 women she interviewed while travelling to every state and territory over a six-month period last year to learn about Australia’s progress towards gender equality.
Kate Jenkins: ‘I witnessed tremendous resilience from women overcoming the entrenched obstacles to their progress.’ Photograph: Mick Tsikas/AAP
Women working in rural and remote areas were particularly vulnerable to inequality, Jenkins found. One young woman told her how she was asked to wear a bikini while fruit picking to get paid a bonus. Jenkins heard stories of women not being taken seriously or experiencing sexual harassment in these areas in particular. “A lot of the rural women were really facing greater barriers to women in metro areas,” she said.
It’s too easy to lump all women together as a homogenous group of white, Anglo-Saxon, heterosexual, able-bodied people, many who feel they are breaking down some of those barriers to equality.
But there are many different voices in this, and my voice is tied to having spoken to rural women, LGBTI women, older women, women with disabilities, migrant women and Aboriginal women.
Research shows that women with disabilities are 40% more likely than women without disabilities to be the victims of domestic violence; and that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women are 32 times more likely to be admitted to hospital as a result of family violence-related assault than non-Indigenous women in Australia.
The findings were launched today to coincide with international women’s day. Jenkins said it was distressing to see the same arguments emerge each year that having a day for women was biased against men and unnecessary.
New Zealand was the first country to give women the vote but gender equality is far from achieved. The pay gap is of particular concern, having remained steady at about 12% for the past decade.
On current figures, it will be 45 years before New Zealand women are paid equally. That’s even though the Equal Pay Act was passed in 1972 – it has never been enforced.
Last month the New Zealand Council of Trade Unions launched the Treat Her Right campaign to lobby the government to take action on the issue of pay inequality.
Why are women still getting paid less than men?
On Tuesday, the Ministry for Women released the findings of the first comprehensive study of the causes of the gender pay gap in New Zealand. It found that “hard to measure factors” such as conscious and unconscious bias, and “differences in choices and behaviours between men and women”, accounted for 80% of the difference.
For women on higher wages, the pay gap was significant and hard to explain; for women on lower incomes, factors such as type of work, family responsibilities, education and age remained important.
In her first major speech since taking on the portfolio of minister for women, Paula Bennett said the difference in pay was “really disappointing”, and called on her audience – members of the Human Resource Institute of New Zealand – to take steps towards addressing it.
She urged employers to remember three things:
It’s not about what you can get away with. It’s not about what she is willing to accept. It’s simply about you paying her what she is worth.
Julia Gillard, former prime minister of Australia and current chair of the board of the Global Partnership for Education, writes today for Guardian Australia about the hidden women of International Women’s Day:
Considering that approximately 130 million girls worldwide are not attending primary through upper-secondary school and that women represent nearlytwo thirds of the world’s illiterate, we must ask: How many other innovations and inventions – great and small – have been lost to the world because so many minds are idle on the sidelines of human progress?
Today is set to be one of the most political International Women’s Days in history, Alexandra Topping and Molly Redden report:
From Thailand to Poland, the United States to Australia, the first Global Women’s Strike will see action on both the industrial and domestic fronts, with participants keen to show solidarity with an energised global women’s movement.
“We are united, we are international – and we are everywhere,” said Klementyna Suchanow, a Poland-based organiser of the Global Women’s Strike, adding that the walkout would put governments and institutions under pressure by giving women a voice that has long been ignored. “We are an army of women across the globe and we are no longer asking to be listened to. The world is being forced to listen to us.”
Women in Poland went on strike in October 2016 to fight for entitlement to legal abortion, sex education and contraception. Photograph: Stephanie Lecocq/EPA
The theme for 2017’s International Women’s Day – which celebrates the social, economic, cultural and political achievements of women – is #BeBoldForChange.
Organisers of the Global Women’s Strike have joined forces with coordinators of the Women’s March and hundreds of human rights and women’s campaigners to capitalise on momentum in the movement in the wake of Donald Trump’s election. Up to 2 million people around the world marched for equality in January the day after his inauguration.
The Women’s March – which now has organisers across 200 cities in 80 countries – has called on supporters not to engage in paid or unpaid labour and only spend money in small and female-owned businesses.
Recognising that the poor financial situation and rigid work laws mean many will not be able to take part in a physical strike, organisers are urging supporters to wear red, a colour historically associated with the labour movement, in solidarity.
In other countries women will wear black, or different colours, while the focus on issues from femicide to abortion will be decided in each nation.
Hello from Sydney, where International Women’s Day is up and running (and for readers still in Tuesday time zones: think of this as a bonus preview).
We’ll be covering the full day live from our offices in Sydney, London and New York; and with correspondents chipping in from all over the world.
We’ll be watching out for events, protests and stories of “ a day without women”, as well as highlighting some of the key (and less key but just really, persistently irritating) issues that continue to thwart and hinder progress towards equality worldwide.
We’d also like to hear what’s happening where you are – let me know in the comments below or find me on Twitter @Claire_Phipps.
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