Crowds take to streets to strike, protest
MADRID — Women across Europe and Asia shouted their demands for equality, respect and empowerment Thursday to mark International Women’s Day, with protesters in Spain launching a 24-hour strike and crowds of demonstrators filling the streets of Manila, Seoul and New Delhi.
Spanish women were staging dozens of protests across the country against the wage gap and gender violence. In Barcelona, protesters disrupting traffic were pushed back by riot police.
In Madrid, hundreds of women gathered in its central square to demand change. Teresa Sonsur, a 38-year-old social services agency worker, said she wanted to end workplace discrimination.
“What we see in our job in social services is that the women are doing all the hard work, dealing with the customers, but in the positions of management it is always men,” she said.
In France, a leading French newspaper found a witty way of making its point about discrimination and the gender pay gap — by upping its price for men. The leftleaning daily Liberation said that for one day only, men would pay 50 euro cents more than women, in a reflection of the 25 percent less that women in France are paid, on average.
Across Asia, women came out to mark the day. In China, students at Tsinghua University used the day to make light of a proposed constitutional amendment to scrap term limits for the country’s president. One banner joked that a boyfriend’s term should also have no limits.
At rallies in Pakistan capital Islamabad, its largest city Karachi, and the cultural capital of Lahore, women denounced violence against them in Pakistan, where nearly 1,000 women are killed by close relatives each year in so-called honor killings.
Hundreds of activists in pink and purple shirts protested in downtown Manila against Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, calling him among the worst violators of women’s rights in Asia.
In Afghanistan, hundreds of women, who would have been afraid to leave their homes during Taliban rule, gathered in the capital, Kabul, to commemorate the day.
In India, hundreds of women marched through the capital, New Delhi, to bring attention to domestic violence, sexual attacks and discrimination in jobs and wages.
In Africa, Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni urged men to stop physically abusing their wives. Domestic violence is common in Uganda, although victims rarely report perpetrators to the police for fear of being stigmatized or thrown out of their homes.