Equality and empowerment

Mar 10, 2025 Editorial, News

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Editorial 

Kaieteur News- On Saturday Guyana joined the rest of the world in celebrating International Women’s Day. This year the occasion was celebrated under the theme “For ALL Women and Girls: Rights. Equality. Empowerment.” According to the United Nations, this year’s theme called for action that can unlock equal rights, power and opportunities for all and a feminist future where no one is left behind. Central to this vision is empowering the next generation—youth, particularly young women and adolescent girls—as catalysts for lasting change, the UN said.

Additionally, the United Nations said the year 2025 is a pivotal moment as it marks the 30^th anniversary of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action. This document is the most progressive and widely endorsed blueprint for women’s and girls’ rights worldwide that transformed the women’s rights agenda in terms of legal protection, access to services, youth engagement, and change in social norms, stereotypes and ideas stuck in the past.

We at this paper salute our Guyanese sisters and daughters, and all those others of the fairer gender who fall in some classification of relationship, whether as friend, family, or as stranger.
Our women are to be cherished, not as objects, but for what they have achieved against the odds, of how far they have come. We still must bear in mind that they have a great amount of territory in front of them to be covered. We have Guyanese women in their numbers beyond the traditional fields of teaching and nursing. They now proudly and properly occupy many spaces in the higher rungs of those professions. We are glad for them, and applaud them, with the hope that more of the younger ones will be inspired with the thinking that they, too, can do so.
We have women in the lower and upper ranks of our law enforcement apparatus, and in our national defence capabilities. In politics, there are women ministers, in the public service, there are women Permanent Secretaries, and in several state agencies there are women running the show at the top, or as heads of departments. Most of all, we have the unsung and the largely unknown: those Guyanese women who go from day to day with the responsibilities and burdens, and somehow manage to keep going. It is where they must be financial analyst and economist, how they must be breadwinner and discipline enforcer and mentor all at the same time. It is when and how they are worker on their feet and chief cook and bottle- washer in the home.
How they do it, we don’t pretend to know, and which balancing family and career don’t even begin to consider or cover the sum of what is involved with being a partner, a mother, a sister, daughter and neighbour, and an ever available and ready helper, wherever they are. Impressive may not be enough of a complete description of women on this International Women’s Day, unreal and otherworldly seems more closer to fitting the bill, but it is one which they must pay every day in the shoes that they are called upon to fill.
Yet, as meaningful and visible as the progress of women in our society has been, there are those circumstances of some, too many, which bring a pause, and give cause to raised eyebrows, in this presenting of their plights in the most peaceable of manner. We have two women in our judiciary, at the top of their profession and at the head of their operations. But instead of being the cream of the local court system, they have come to represent the kind of organisational froth. This is best attributed to the follies, farces, and failures of tricky political figures always on the lookout for an advantage, even when the judiciary is the area under consideration.
There are other areas, involving other women, where they are held hostage to the whims and antics of political leaders and decision-makers. They are part of the pawns in Guyana’s perpetual power struggles that take shape behind the scenes, the traditional collateral damage that results from the wars being fought out of sight. These are part of the contradictions that plague this society. They are what embarrass and humiliate our womenfolk as much as any domestic abuse victim, but in the workplace.
For too long we have taken our women in this society and culture for granted. It is that they are there, and that should be enough, all that is required. This has to change, and not from the words and actions of political leaders, who themselves have among the worst records of domestic cruelties and more. Change must be in the minds and hands of rank-and-file Guyanese men and sons and brothers: these women of ours count, and we must make them feel that way, by how we care for them, conduct ourselves in their company, or away from it. Those are our greatest recommendations, our best character references.

(Equality and empowerment)

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• adolescent girls, Editorial, Guyanese sisters and daughters, International Women’s Day, United Nations

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