Until all 365 days become women’s day – Article by Eleni Mavrou, AKEL Political Bureau member

 

Sunday 6 March 2022, “Haravgi” newspaper

The 8th March is approaching again this year. Women will again hear promises and nice words. At a time when they are still, in almost the entire world, the faceless masses who fill the paintings of horror and misery.

Women are the unsung victims of our age. Most victims of war are women and children. Most victims of human trafficking are women and girls. Most of the world’s refugees are women and children. Most of the world’s poor are women and children.

In many countries women are condemned to a social exclusion that includes almost everything: poverty, domestic violence, unemployment, inadequate health care and inadequate education system, inability to access financial resources… The reality is even worse for women of minorities, elderly women, women with disabilities, migrant and refugee women.

Women are excluded from the top positions in government, society and the economy – men are on average three times as numerous in parliaments around the world. The gender pay gap is still dominant – according to a study carried out by the World Economic Forum, it will take 275 years to close this gap. As for violence, harassment and sexist behaviour, it is positive that women are starting to speak out. But for this to yield results, everyone’s ears and minds must be opened.

Cyprus is no exception. In 2021 we are still fighting for things that should have by now been considered self-evident.

Government policies of promoting “less state” have shrunk childcare and elderly care infrastructures, namely things that relieve women of the responsibilities imposed on them by stereotypes. DISY’s ideological dogmatism with the “free market” that…supposedly regulates everything, is wiping out women retail workers. For nine years now, the government ruling force’s policies have kept Cyprus at the bottom of European and international rankings on gender equality issues. This is so because equality demands policies that are accompanied by action. And in Cyprus, today, both one and the other are absent.

These days we pay tribute to the struggles waged by the women’s movement. We honor the women who rose up in March 1857 to demand equal pay. We honor the woman who works 10 and 12 hours a day, even on Sunday, for a meagre wage. The woman who chose or happened to raise her children alone and struggles to make ends meet. The woman who was raped because someone still sees her as an object. The woman who fights the waves with her child in her arms, seeking a better life. The woman whose war has killed everything, even hope.

The 8th of March, then, is nothing other than just another day, along with the other 364, where women suffer inequality and struggle for equality.