Swiss women protest violence, pay
Sexism, education gap among issues of concern
GENEVA — Thousands of women across Switzerland walked off the job, burned bras and blocked traffic Friday in a day of demonstrations to demand fairer pay, more equality and an end to sexual harassment and violence. It was the first such protests in the Alpine nation in 28 years.
Discontent over sexism and workplace inequality in prosperous Switzerland underpinned the women’s strike. Many protesters were also demanding more pay specifically for domestic workers, teachers and caregivers — jobs typically held by women.
Swiss female lawmakers — mostly decked out in purple, the movement’s color — streamed out of parliament Friday in the capital of Bern, where several thousand women were demonstrating, public broadcaster RTS reported.
Hundreds of marchers also blocked roads near the main train station in Zurich, the country’s financial center.
Demonstrators in Geneva’s Parc Bertrand hoisted a banner showing that only 8 percent of jobs in engineering were held by women in Switzerland, in contrast to 91 percent of the country’s domestic help jobs.
The Swiss Federal Statistics office says women on average earned 12 percent less than men for similar work — the so-called gender pay gap — as of 2016, the latest figures available.
In late afternoon in Geneva, thousands of women spread out on the city’s landmark Plainpalais square in a sea of purple.
In Lucerne, hundreds of women staged a sit-down protest in front of the city’s theater, according to the Tages-anzeiger newspaper, and some of the paper’s female reporters joined in.
Swiss women were urged to leave their workplaces at 3:24 p.m. — the time when organizers figured women should stop working to earn proportionally as much as men in a regular workday.
The International Labour Organization reported recently that Switzerland is one of the worst nations in Europe and Central Asia when it comes to the post-high school education gap between the sexes, especially in the STEM science fields.
The Swiss statistics office also says of the 249 homicides recorded in the country between 2009 and 2018, 75 percent of the victims were women and girls.