International Women’s Day

“International Women's Day (IWD) is celebrated on March 8 every year. In different regions the focus of the celebrations ranges from general celebration of respect, appreciation and love towards women for their economic, political and social achievements.” – Wikipedia

In addition to the definition that Wikipedia provides above, International Women’s Day also mainly focus to promote a gender equality – without pursing one to be superior to another – in which case women have been discriminated for a long time – perhaps thousand years. There is also an International Men’s Day, which is celebrated every November 19, with the same idea to promote gender equality. Well, men are also discriminated in some way, such as the idea that men should not cry. 

Back to women’s discrimination, it can occur in any forms. It can be a limitation for women to pursue higher education – which was fought by R. A. Kartini a century ago in Indonesia – or that women don’t have any chance to have a certain job, or as simple as that women are judged by wearing pants.

Women discrimination happens all around the world and can be different from a country to another depends on their culture. And so does the celebration of this day. Here in Freiburg, people are celebrating International Women’s Day through many ways, like demonstration, public discussion, and movie night. 

In my college, we celebrated this day by having a Global Affairs session discussing the gender equality issue in general. It made us question stuff, such as whether there had been a gender equality in our college or not, or whether we had experienced this issue personally in our life. Then, we also watched a TED-talks about “Everyday Sexism”. It is an online project initiated by Laura Bates where women all around the world can share their experience of being discriminated by their gender in any way. If you are interested on this project, you can visit the website directly at http://everydaysexism.com/ or watch the video we watched down below.

Last but not least, there are still many extreme women discriminations worldwide. One of the most extreme is Female Genital Mutilation. Female Genital Mutilation is basically a circumcision (penyunatan) of external part of women genital. This circumcision doesn’t have any medical reason (based on WHO), while many women are being forced to do this worldwide. 

The most extreme case is in Somalia, where 98% of women are cut. But, this is also happening in many countries, including Indonesia. I am not an expert of this issue, but if the case is that there is no medical reason or even it can have negative impact on health and women are being forced (directly or socially), this should STOP! You can help by signing a petition to ban FGM in Somalia at https://www.avaaz.org/en/fgm_somalia_ban_loc/?fpla . 

After all, I just want to say: let's have a peaceful world where there is no discrimination of anything, like gender, races, religion, and so on, starting with ourselves and our actions in daily life :). Thanks for reading!

 

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PS: I just want to let you know that since now my posts are more likely going to be in English because there is an increase of non-Indonesian readers of this blog and I want to reach them to spread the word as well. I will always try to make everything easy to read as much as possible ;)

Regards,

Bayu