INTERNATIONAL WOMEN'S Day, like the movement for women's rights it celebrates, is now part of the political and social mainstream.
It is so respectable that it is easy to forget that it originated in a raw struggle for basic justice. When a million women first marked the day in Austria, Denmark, Germany and Switzerland in 1911, they were demanding the right to work, to vote, to be trained, and to hold public office. Now that those rights have been secured, at least in principle, in democratic societies across the world, the festival, like the women's movement in general, can be seen as a vestige of history.
The reality is that the fight for gender equality goes on. Institutionalised discrimination against women remains in place in many societies, and even where women are theoretically equal, they may still be locked in a second class status. Sexual violence against women and girls has become an organised feature of conflicts. Women produce half the world's food, but own only 1 per cent of its farmland. Over half a million women still die each year from preventable complications of pregnancy and childbirth. Of the more than one billion people in the developing world who live on less than a dollar a day, 70 per cent are women.
Globally, just 17 per cent of the membership of the lower houses of parliaments is female. Shamefully, in Ireland, the proportion, just 13 per cent, is even lower, and the number of women candidates in the 2007 general election was the lowest since 1989. This alone points to the dangers of complacency about gender equality in Ireland. The progress made by the feminist movement is evident from Ireland's respectable ninth place in the World Economic Forum's gender gap index. The progress that is still to be made is indicated, however, by the fact that we get this rank in spite of coming only 44th for the proportion of women in senior legislative, administrative and managerial jobs.
The big victories for the feminist movement in the 1970s and 1980s opened the way to a great influx of women into the workforce. But many women have been left behind as lone parents and carers at a high risk of poverty. Women who have taken paid jobs have found that they still have to do more than their fair share of the caring and housework. State neglect of subjects like childcare and parental leave reflects the continuing reality that issues of urgent concern to women are still low down on the political agenda. While that remains the case, International Women's Day marks the struggles, not just of the past, but also of the present day.