International Women’s Day messages

Mar 08, 2018 News

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United Nation’s Secretary General, António Guterres

We are at a pivotal moment for women’s rights. The historical and structural inequalities that have allowed oppression and discrimination to flourish are being exposed like never before. From Latin America to Europe to Asia, on social media, on film sets, on the factory floor and in the streets, women are calling for lasting change and zero tolerance for sexual assault, harassment, and discrimination of all kinds.
Achieving gender equality and empowering women and girls is the unfinished business of our time, and the greatest human rights challenge in our world.
The activism and advocacy of generations of women has borne fruit. There are more girls in school than ever before; more women are doing paid work and in senior roles in the private sector, academia, politics and in international organizations, including the United Nations. Gender equality is enshrined in countless laws, and harmful practices like female genital mutilation and child marriage have been outlawed in many countries.
But serious obstacles remain if we are to address the historic power imbalances that underpin discrimination and exploitation.
More than a billion women around the world lack legal protection against domestic sexual violence. The global gender pay gap is 23 percent, rising to 40 percent in rural areas, and the unpaid work done by many women goes unrecognized. Women’s representation in national parliaments stands, on average, at less than one quarter, and in boardrooms it is even lower. Without concerted action, millions more girls will be subjected to genital mutilation over the next decade.
Where laws exist, they are often ignored, and women who pursue legal redress are doubted, denigrated and dismissed. We now know that sexual harassment and abuse have been thriving in workplaces, public spaces and private homes, in countries that pride themselves on their record of gender equality.
The United Nations should set an example for the world.
We have now reached gender parity for the first time in my senior management team, and I am determined to achieve this throughout the organization. I am totally committed to zero tolerance of sexual harassment and have set out plans to improve reporting and accountability. We are working closely with countries around the world to prevent and address sexual exploitation and abuse by staff in peacekeeping missions, and to support victims.
We at the United Nations stand with women around the world as they fight to overcome the injustices they face, whether they are rural women dealing with wage discrimination, urban women organizing for change, women refugees at risk of exploitation and abuse, or women who experience intersecting forms of discrimination such as widows, indigenous women, women with disabilities and women, who do not conform to gender norms.
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Guyana Human Rights Association

Guyana finds itself on International Women’s Day 2018 in a strange world in which well-meaning officialdom has over decades embraced vague terms such as ‘gender mainstreaming’ at the expense of promoting ‘women’s rights’. As a result, a catalogue of gender legal reforms has minimally influenced the pervasive gender violence perpetrated against women at all levels of the society.
In other words, we are full of well-meaning laws to protect women and girls, which protect almost no one.
Guyana has had legislation in place for over two decades relating to equality in marriage and division of property; domestic violence is recognized as a public rather than a private matter; age of consent has been raised; the prosecution of sexual offences has been modernized; trafficking legislation has been fast-tracked and a Women and Gender Commission is in place.
Co-existing with the above, is the real world of Guyana’s low-intensity gender wars with young women and girl children on the front-line fending off predatory businessmen, mini-bus workers, religious leaders and male teachers.
Young girls groomed by men a few years older than themselves are staying away from home, charged with wandering and sent to the New Opportunity Corps (NOC) vulnerable to sexual abuse by staff and inmates. Delinquent males, on the other hand, are detained for short periods and released without any charges.
Girl children are being sold at frighteningly young ages by some parents in mining areas for the cost of a bottle of liquor and teen-age pregnancy is becoming the norm.
Thus the impressive catalogue of progressive legislation, referred to earlier, co-exists with a woeful level of implementation. This inability to ensure safe, equal and dignified lives to women and girls is rooted in the mistaken notion that once legislation is on the books, it will be automatically effective.
This attitude has been reflected in Government-approved, project-oriented policies for decades, which has never disturbed the deep-rooted chauvinism that permeates and dominates the religious, professional, political, business and cultural sectors of Guyanese life.
Indeed, the potential of the women’s rights activism, which had produced the legislative change in the first place was quite quickly substituted by promoting the amorphous concept of ‘gender’ at the cost of women’s rights.
United Nations Agencies, ironically, (in view of their mandate to promote women’s rights) have played a leading role in this process of disarming women’s rights.
The ‘gender’ rather than ‘women’s rights’ focus, was harnessed programmatically to a strategy of ‘educating’ rather than dis-empowering men, thereby undermining women’s activism in Guyana.
This progression was reflected officially in the creation initially of a Women’s Bureau, which was then felt to require a ‘Men’s Bureau to re-assure men they had nothing to fear from women’s’ progress.
This short-lived silliness has now seen both the “Women’s” and the “Men’s” Bureau absorbed into the ‘Gender’ Bureau, with the additional re-assurance that any offending ‘rights’ matters which escaped this neutering process, would be ‘main-streamed’ into anonymity.
The dysfunctional logic of men dis-empowering themselves by implementing legislation which threatens their dominance is further challenged by the recent revelations of sexual harassment by famous and well-placed women which galvanized global media attention in recent months. Patriarchy is so ingrained, even in the most progressive societies on the planet, that women need to resort to extra-ordinary displays of personal courage to assert their dignity and safety. What of the millions of less privileged women? How are they to be liberated from this pervasive problem?
Speaking out exposes the speaker to as many judgments about herself as about the perpetrator. Women are also conflicted over the consequences of speaking out. She may be satisfied with an apology or even that the facts are out there but not to set in train a series of consequences that may involve peoples jobs, or break-up of families.
All these are good reasons to give pause to talking out. They also sketch the framework of issues, which have to be resolved for speaking out to become a safe and salutary exercise.
Guyanese men are still far from recognizing how entrenched and systematic sexual harassment is in our society.
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European Commission

Equality between women and men is one of the fundamental values of the European Union enshrined in our treaties. Our Union is a pioneer in tackling gender-based discrimination and we can be proud of the progress achieved: Europe is one of the safest and most equal places for women in the world.
But our work is not over – the path to full equality in practice is still a long one. Women and girls still face harassment, abuse and violence. And women are still too often prevented from breaking the glass ceiling, receiving lower pay and fewer opportunities for career and business development.
We want girls and women to achieve equality in all aspects of life: access to education, equal pay for equal work, access to top positions in companies and politics as well as protection from violence.
Advancing women’s leadership and economic empowerment is an absolute priority for us. The European Union has put forward new legislation to improve work-life balance for working parents and caregivers, and an Action Plan to close the gender pay gap; and we are making sure that we lead by example: in February 2018, the number of women in managerial positions in the European Commission reached 36%, up from 11% when we took office in November 2014. President Juncker has committed to reaching 40% by 31 October 2019 at the end of our mandate.
We are also consistent in all aspects of all our policies, both inside the EU and in our external action by promoting gender equality and women’s empowerment.
Our policy contributes to the successful global implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals and the Women, Peace and Security Agenda. This year’s European Development Days will focus on the vital role of women and girls in sustainable development, their equal participation and leadership in all walks of life.
In addition, this year the EU has the leadership of the “Call to Action for Protection Against Gender-Based Violence”, which brings together over 60 countries and organisations striving to ensure that gender-based violence is addressed in humanitarian crises.
The European Union assists women and girls across the world who are on the move or displaced, who are victims of violence, such as through the Spotlight initiative, or who are excluded from education, equal access to health and family planning services, the labour market, and political life more generally.
Over 15 million girls of primary school age do not go to school around the world, so the EU is helping boost access to education from Africa, Latin America and the Middle East, to South East Asia.
Gender equality is not just about fairness and justice in Europe – it is also a necessity to achieve sustainable peace, security, development, economic prosperity and growth around the world.
Investing in the potential of women and girls is an investment in our whole society and is the responsibility of men and boys as much as women and girls.
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Guyana Agricultural and General Workers Union (GAWU)

The Guyana Agricultural and General Workers Union (GAWU) salutes the women of the world on this International Women’s Day. It is indisputable that women have played an important role in the advancement of civilization and, increasingly today, they are engaged in all spheres of human endeavour in many countries of the world.
We recall that International Women’s Day emerged out of the struggles of women workers in the United States, who organized themselves to strike for better working conditions, better pay, and voting rights and against women’s oppression and gender inequality. These struggles made us better understand the inseparable links between economic rights and political rights. Their struggles also show that the concerns of working people the world over are shared between women and men.
The day dedicated to women, gained prominence when socialist women workers identified it as a day of action to rally against the First World War. On the same day in 1917, a strike of working women of Russia took place in protest at the killing of two million soldiers in the war and which provided a further impetus for the history-making Russian Revolution which occurred in that year and which saw the birth of a socialist country for the first time in the annals of civilization.
In-as-much that women have made worthy contributions to mankind’s development and generally made notable strides in their own lives they must still contend with multi-faceted problems – poverty, economic inequality, discrimination in work life, oppression and various manifestations of violence.
Apart from work-related problems the question of domestic violence has risen to the fore and has been condemned worldwide. GAWU continues to condemn such abuses of women as we strongly also condemn the violence meted out to them and their families in conditions of poverty, exploitation and wars.
This year the United Nations (UN) theme is “Time is Now: Rural and urban activists transforming women’s lives”. We feel this is a laudable objective. And, it is timely to call on the governments primarily and various organisations to work towards the realization of this UN theme.
Gender equality is possible in our day and will certainly be yet another significant step in recognizing the indispensable role of women in the all-round development of human-kind.

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