Women around world demand equality
Millions strike in Spain, protests in Iran and Turkey, Saudis run in the streets
In joyous celebrations and angry protests, women around the world came together in gatherings large and small to mark International Women’s Day with a call for gender equality.
The day had extra resonance this year after widespread sexual abuse accusations in Hollywood grew the #MeToo movement which feminists hope signals one of the most significant shifts towards equality in decades.
In Saudi Arabia, a group of women whooped and cheered as they marked International Women’s Day by exercising a recently acquired freedom: the right to go for a jog.
Wearing traditional full-length robes adapted for sports, they pounded through sleepy alleys past puzzled shopkeepers in Jeddah’s historic district. Women in the deeply conservative kingdom are hopeful of huge changes. The Government introduced physical education for girls last year and began licensing women’s sports clubs, but Saudis are still coming around to women running in public. The biggest change yet will come in this year when Saudi women will be allowed to drive.
In Spain, women went on a nationwide strike and held hundreds of rallies, closing many main roads and squares. Their protests included bike rallies, marches, and midnight potbanging sessions at which they chanted slogans such as “We continue to fight regardless of the cost” and “Long live the women’s struggle”.
The two largest unions said around six million women took part. There was no official count.
In Turkey’s Hatay province, near the Syrian border, women wept as they sat on the ground, their hands bound with scarves, to show solidarity with women imprisoned in Syria. Others waved flags, chanting against President Bashar al-Assad: “Murderer Assad, evacuate the prisons!”
In Manila, more than a thousand activists marched, calling President Rodrigo Duterte a “macho-fascist” for his lewd comments and treatment of his female critics.
In Iran, where there has been a spate of protests against mandatory Islamic dress, women and men gathered in front of the Ministry of Cooperatives, Labour, and Social Welfare, chanting slogans, videos on social media showed. “No to gender inequality, no to discriminatory laws”, the women chanted in a video.
The Centre for Human Rights in Iran, a New York-based advocacy group, said at least 12 people were arrested.
Tehran prosecutor Abbas Jafari Dolatabadi said that one of the girls who removed her veil in Tehran to protest against compulsory hijab has been sentenced to two years in jail. Dolatabadi said the woman, whom he did not name, was found guilty of “promoting corruption by removing her veil in public”.
Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei yesterday accused Iran’s enemies of funding anti-hijab protests.
“As the result some girls were deceived and removed their veil here and there,” he said. “But that’s a small issue. What I find worrying is that some of the elite are now questioning mandatory hijab.”
A22 McDonald’s Women’s Day gesture hasn’t impressed critics.
research suggests that they benefit most from increases in that minimum.
“Hey McDonalds,” tweeted Nathan Lerner, a progressive activist. “Maybe instead of a cheap PR stunt where you make the M a W to ‘support’ women, you do something real — like paying your workers a living wage.”
It is not the first time that women’s groups have identified the minimum wage as a feminist issue. The National Women’s Law Centre, a nonprofit advocacy group, has argued that raising the minimum is key to closing the gender pay gap and advancing the economic interests of women.
Despite these arguments, McDonald’s and other fastfood chains have resisted calls to provide a so-called living wage — and, frequently, have fought against such raises. Doctors in Canada have called for a cut in their own wages to help mitigate a squeeze on public health service budgets. More than 750 physicians, residents and medical students in Quebec signed an online letter opposing a recent salary rise negotiated by their unions. “These increases are all the more shocking because our nurses, clerks, and other professionals face very difficult working conditions, while our patients live with the lack of access to required services because of the drastic cuts in recent years,” reads the letter. “The only thing that seems to be immune to the cuts is our remuneration.” Last October, the association representing Quebec’s 9500 family doctors signed an eight-year deal with the province that would result doctors’ salaries rising by an average of 1.8 per cent annually. The pay rise would add C$4400 ($4688) annually to a GP’s average salary of C$245,000. But it would still be 15 to 20 per cent lower than what doctors are paid in Ontario, Canada’s most populous province. Last month, another deal was reached between the Quebec Government and the province’s 10,000 medical specialists, which would see their annual salaries increase by 1.4 per cent annually. On average, Quebec specialists earn an average salary of C$403,537. Gaetan Barrette, the Quebec health minister, said last month that if doctors “feel they are overpaid, they can leave the money on the table. I guarantee you I can make good use of it”.
A huge panda park aimed at boosting numbers of the long-endangered species and bringing tourism to remote parts of China has moved a step closer to becoming reality after it secured 10 billion yuan ($2.16b) worth of funding. The Giant Panda National Park will be developed across a vast mountainous area covering 25,900sq km — about three times the size of Yellowstone National Park in the United States. It will establish “migration corridors” to link the current 67 panda reserves on six isolated mountain ranges across an area spanning three provinces. The new park will allow for the bears to “mate with pandas from other areas, enrich their gene pool and raise their numbers in the wild”, state media said.
Factory fire kills three
A massive fire that started in a chemical factory in western India and spread to six other factories killed at least three workers and injured 13, police said yesterday. Police officer Manjunath Shinge said the bodies were recovered hours after the fire erupted at the factory in Palghar district in Maharashtra state. The fire was set off by a boiler explosion, but the cause of the explosion was not immediately known.