The celebration across the world today of International Women's Day is a reminder to the complacent that although much has been done to raise the status and economic power of women in our world, more remains to be done.
Institutionalised discrimination in society at large or in the workplace may not be as apparent as it was, but the truth is that women still earn on average only two -thirds of male pay, that they do twice the unpaid work of men, and that they make up 70 per cent of the world's 1.3 billion poorest (living on less than $1 a day).
At a political level, only 12 of the UN's 192 states are led by a woman.
Changing that situation is still an uphill struggle, in some places fraught with danger. Activists demonstrating for women's rights in Turkey at the weekend were batoned off the streets by police in a manner which suggests that that country still has a lot to learn about human rights before it accedes to the European Union. That its foreign minister should have promptly deplored the police action as "disproportionate" and announced an inquiry is to be welcomed.
Ten years after the landmark Beijing UN women's summit, the UN Commission on the Status of Women has been meeting in New York to review the very patchy progress on the action plan agreed by governments in Beijing. Although new employment opportunities globally have pushed the female participation rate in the workforce up to a new high of 39 per cent, unions report that current trends tend to reinforce the tendency for women to remain confined to lower-paid, sexually-segregated jobs. Although there have been significant improvements on the equal pay front in a number of OECD countries, the UN also reports two other persistent problems in the workplace: the "glass ceiling" - a failure to reach top levels even where women may predominate in particular jobs; and the "sticky floor" - their inability to break out of low-pay menial work at the bottom of the pile.
In Ireland, women still face many of the same problems, although their participation in the workforce rose to over 771,000 in 2004, a remarkable increase of some 300,000 in less than 10 years and one which has helped to drive economic growth. Yet, as Ictu pointed out yesterday, while 87 per cent of women aged 20 to 44 without children are active in the labour force, less than 54 per cent of those with children under five are in paid work. Those with children also tend to suffer losses in terms of pay and promotion.
The provision of State-regulated childcare, whether it is public or private, is the single most important advance that can be made to improve the status and contribution of women in Irish society in 2005.
