News Karnataka
Friday, March 29 2024
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Opinion

This International Women’s Day, let’s show women more respect and less ‘worship’

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It is common knowledge that International Women’s Day (IWD) is celebrated every year on March 8, however, not many (including women) know why this is so or how it started.

International Women’s Day was instituted in order to celebrate and honour the achievements of women throughout history, all across the globe, and started as a movement way back in the 1900s. Typically, it is a day for women to come together, regardless of their background or culture, to fight for gender equality and women’s rights, and to celebrate each other.

At least 20 countries, including Afghanistan, Cuba, Laos, Russia, and Vietnam already observe a holiday on IWD. In countries like Nepal and China, IWD is a holiday only for women. In the United States of America, while it isn’t yet recognised as an official holiday, it has been proposed.

In some countries, men honour their mothers, wives, girlfriends, and colleagues with flowers and small presents, while in some other countries, IWD is celebrated along the same lines as Mother’s Day, where children give gifts to their mothers and grandmothers.

While women have entered and made great strides in almost every field, even as of 2020, no country can boast of having achieved gender equality. According to the UN, 2.7 billion women are blocked from accessing the same choice of jobs as men due to legal restrictions, and less than 25 per cent of parliamentarians across the world were women (as of 2019). Also, even today, one in three women experience gender-based violence.

Many of us have seen, either with our own eyes or on the news, how women keep becoming victims of violence both at home and in public, and how women are not taken seriously by men, as well as other women.

Women and girls all over the world continue to be undervalued. Often times, we keep popular women on pedestals and honour them, whilst the ones closest to us are ignored, ill-treated or disrespected.

So, this year, instead of buying flowers, chocolates, gifts and such for the women close to you just for one day, spend the entire year – not just March 8 – treating them with respect, supporting them, encouraging them, empowering them and fighting for them, instead of back-biting, slut-shaming, body-shaming, harassing, disrespecting and assaulting them.

We don’t need anyone to patronise us. We just want respect, gender equality, equal pay, equal opportunity… basically, we don’t want you to look at us and think, “There’s no way she can do it”, or “She may not be strong/capable enough to do it”. We want you to look at us and think, “Let’s give her a chance.”

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Andrea Noronha

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