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Women’s Rights

Gender Wage Gap Persists In 2023

March 12 is Equal Pay Day, a reminder that there is still a significant pay gap between men and women in our country. The date represents how far into 2024 women would have to work on top of the hours they worked in 2023 simply to match what men were paid in 2023. Women were paid 21.8% less on average than men in 2023, after controlling for race and ethnicity, education, age, and geographic division. There has been little progress in narrowing this gender wage gap over the past three decades. While the pay gap declined between 1979 and 1994—due to men’s stagnant wages, not a tremendous increase in women’s wages—it has remained mostly flat since then.

International Women’s Day 2024: Equality At Work And Democracy

Women face systemic inequalities, including unequal labour force participation, the persistent gender pay gap, overrepresentation in informal sectors and workplace harassment. Moreover, populist movements and authoritarian regimes continue to undermine decades of progress towards equality for women, which has included equitable workplace participation, economic and political empowerment and access to education. ITUC General Secretary Luc Triangle said: "The path to a truly inclusive, equitable and democratic society is through the relentless pursuit of gender equality at work.

We Won’t Go Back Into Our Cages: Celebrating Women’s Day In Nicaragua

“We have painful stories, stories of marginalization, a history of being trampled because we are women and even more because we are rural peasant women, campesinas,” says Rosibel Ramos, bright eyes belying her age. “What were women’s spaces?” She asks. “The kitchen, taking care of kids, taking care of everyone else. We were supposed to just sit quietly in a corner.” Rosibel, now in her 60s, is telling the story of the founding of the Rural Feminist Ecological Cooperative “Las Diosas”* which means The Goddesses. The co-op is made up of hundreds of women from northern Nicaragua who grow, process and sell organic and fair-trade certified coffee, hibiscus and honey.  

More ‘Navigators’ Are Helping Women Travel To Have Abortions

Chloe Bell is a case manager at the National Abortion Federation. She spends her days helping people cover the cost of an abortion and, increasingly, the interstate travel many of them need to get the procedure. “What price did they quote you?” Bell asked a woman from New Jersey who had called the organization’s hotline seeking money to pay for an abortion. Her appointment was the next day. “They quoted me $500,” said the woman, who was five weeks pregnant when she spoke to Bell in November. She gave permission for a journalist to listen to the call on the condition that she not be named. “We can definitely help,” Bell told her.

Think #MeToo Didn’t Make A Real Difference? Think Again

What difference did #MeToo actually make? In 2017 and 2018, the viral hashtag became a global sensation that motivated millions to speak out about sexual assault and harassment. But more recently, critics have questioned whether the flurry of activity ended up leaving much of a legacy. This questioning is hardly surprising. If there is one thing that is most consistent when it comes to mass protest movements, it is that these mobilizations will be dismissed by mainstream political observers as being fleeting and inconsequential. Time and again, they are labeled as fads, scolded for being too “confrontational and divisive,” and written off as flash-in-the-pan eruptions with little lasting significance.

Women Across Iceland, Including The Prime Minister, Go On Strike

Schools, shops, banks and Iceland's famous swimming pools shut on Tuesday as women in the volcanic island nation – including the prime minister – went on strike to push for an end to unequal pay and gender-based violence. Icelanders awoke to all-male news teams announcing shutdowns across the country, with public transport delayed, hospitals understaffed and hotel rooms uncleaned. Trade unions, the strike's main organisers, called on women and nonbinary people to refuse paid and unpaid work, including chores. About 90% of the country's workers belong to a union.

Chile’s Proposed New Constitution Threatens Women’s Rights

Chilean society is once again at the culmination of a transformative constitutional process. This pivotal juncture will decide whether the constitution drafted by a legislature dominated by conservative and right-wing parties will replace the current constitution which was established during Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship. After a first failed attempt to establish a new constitution, this new draft introduces stricter measures concerning irregular migration, firmly entrenches the existing pension and healthcare systems—both subjects of substantial critique. It additionally introduces provisions that pose significant threats to sexual and reproductive rights, specifically through the establishment of “rights for those who are about to be born” and the legalization of “conscientious objection” regarding the provision of goods and services.

Mexico’s Supreme Court Decriminalizes Abortion Nationally

On Wednesday, September 6, Mexico’s Supreme Court of Justice (SCJN) unanimously ruled to decriminalize abortion at the national level. The SCJN resolved that the legal system that criminalizes abortion in the Federal Penal Code is unconstitutional as it violates the human rights of women and people with capacity for pregnancy. The ruling came two years after the SCJN first declared criminal penalties for abortion as unconstitutional and ordered the northern State of Coahuila to remove sanctions for abortion from its criminal code in September 2021. The ruling was in response to a case filed in 2018 challenging a criminal law in the Coahuila State legislation that punished women and pregnant individuals for terminating their pregnancy.

For Women At UPS, Fighting The Bosses Means Fighting The Patriarchy

UPS is a male-dominated corporation, both on the corporate side and on the union/worker side. And like across all institutions of our society, there are structural obstacles, challenges, prejudices, issues that women uniquely face at UPS. You could say the same thing about non-white and particularly Black UPSers, as well as LGBTQ+ UPSers. There is a long history of women organizing at UPS that we can’t fully cover here. I’ll throw some links in the show notes that you should definitely check out. That includes the group UPSurge. Yes, UPSurge, which was a largely women-led militant group in 1970s pushing for a fair contract at UPS, members of which eventually merged into the movement we all know Teamsters for a Democratic Union.

Kerala’s Kudumbashree: A Model To Emancipate Women

25 years ago, in May 1998, the Left Democratic Front government of the Indian state of Kerala started the Kudumbashree program as part of the State Poverty Eradication Mission. The program aimed to socially and financially emancipate women by providing them employment opportunities and space to enter decision making bodies. Today, 25 years on, the program has been a massive success with a notable rise in women’s presence in legislative bodies, as well as a large number of women working in various micro enterprises and agricultural projects. TN Seema, a former member of parliament from the Communist Party of India (Marxist) talks about the journey of the program and where it stands today.

Proletariat Of The Proletariat: Women’s Unpaid Labor

The pandemic brought the spotlight on many of the wrongs of capitalism, among them the issue of unpaid labor. The term unpaid labor is generally associated with care work—care for children, the elderly, the sick, and the family—mostly considered “women’s work.” For the majority of care work, capitalism does not provide any remuneration; instead, the “payment” is societal – praise for women’s “motherly nature” while violating all their rights as members of the working class, thus making women what I call “the proletariat of the proletariat.” Although gender-based discrimination in the working class has existed since the establishment of private property, as explained by Engels in his well-known treatise The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (1884), the matter came into sharper focus during the pandemic.

The Toxic Legacy Of US Foreign Policy In Vieques, Puerto Rico

Puerto Ricans had no say in the U.S. war of conquest with Spain over its colonial possessions or in the Treaty of Paris that dictated they were to become the property of a new empire. The United States acted according to a well-crafted strategic narrative  of white saviorism and American exceptionalism without concern for the people whose land it stole. It wanted to further its control to the south and east via its expansionist foreign policy – and it needed to extend military power beyond its violently acquired borders to do so; the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, known as the cornerstone of U.S. foreign policy, provided the impetus.

Women Hold Up 76.2% Of The Sky

There is no need to delve too deeply into statistical data when the findings are obvious. For instance, when women and men work at the same job, women are paid – on average – 20 percent less than men. To raise awareness about this persistent disparity, the International Labour Organisation (ILO) and United Nations Women host the International Equal Pay Day every year on 18 September and, through their Equal Pay International Coalition, lobby corporations and governments to close the yawning gender pay gap. The idea of ‘equal pay for equal work’ was established in the ILO’s Equal Remuneration Convention (1951) in recognition of the fact that women had always worked in industrial factories, increasingly so during the Second World War.

Report On Incarceration And Women Outlines The Gender Disparities

Women represent about 9 percent of all incarcerated people in the United States, but data about their circumstances is spotty at best. We do know that in recent decades, imprisonment rates for women have increased dramatically, growing at twice the pace of men’s incarceration. A report published this month by the nonprofit think tank Prison Policy Initiative (PPI) provides one of the most comprehensive recent assessments of the realities facing women and girls held in the country’s prisons and jails. PPI teamed up with the American Civil Liberties Union to pull data from several government agencies, which can often be fragmented or out of date.

Millions Of Women Protest Across Latin America And The Caribbean

In Argentina, women and gender-diverse people participated in a national strike, organized for the seventh consecutive year, and mobilized throughout the country demanding an end to gender discrimination and violence against women and members of the LGBTQI+ community.
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