Gender equality remains to be “300 years away:” the stark caution from the United Nations, as International Women’s Day comes round another time.
On Monday, throughout the opening consultation of the Commission at the Status of Women, UN Secretary-General, António Guterres, additionally mentioned that ladies’s rights also are being “abused, threatened, and violated around the world.”
“Women and ladies were erased from public existence.”
But, despite what the odds suggest, there are still many women who are leading the fight for what they believe in and hoping for a better world.
Here are just a few:
The fight for abortion rights in Poland
One of “probably the most bad puts for a pregnant girl in Poland is the sanatorium.” That’s according to Marta Lempart, an activist who founded the All-Poland Women’s Strike.
She is just one of the thousands of activists in Poland trying to make reproductive healthcare more accessible. The country is often ranked among the hardest places to get a legal abortion in the European Union.
And why does she consider hospitals so dangerous? “The doctors will put [the mother’s] life and her rights below the rights of the foetus,” Lempart said.
“They won’t even provide her with a legal abortion.”
In the eastern European country, the procedure has been almost completely outlawed. And some pregnant women in extreme situations have been denied effective treatment, in order to protect the foetus.
But, Lempart argued that because of the work done by her other activists, there is still hope in Poland.
When she started her work in 2016, support for legalising abortions stood at around 37%. But that figure has since grown to 70%, polls suggest.
And she added that there are “now two worlds” for people who want to access abortions in the country.
“We have this [underground] system, a system that has always been there,” she said.
“But it’s not even underground anymore. It is a fully working system that provides women with reproductive care […] After the protests in 2020, everybody knows the number for Abortions Without Borders.
“It became like a national sport to put its number everywhere.”
Supporting Ukraine’s trans community
When the war in Ukraine started, Anastasiia Yeva Domani’s apartment became a humanitarian hub for the country’s trans community.
“Our goal was not to mobilise the community, not to advocate or change legislation, but to help people first, with food, money, hormones and medications,” Domani, the co-founder of Cohort, told Euronews.
For some trans women living in Ukraine, help can also mean legal support. That is because many members of the trans community have gender markers on their documentation that do not match their actual genders – such as trans women who have male gender markers on their papers.
This can cause problems for trans women trying to flee Ukraine because of a ban on military-aged men leaving the country. And it can also create challenges when it comes to mobilisation orders to join the army.
“There are cities where a lot of mobilisation orders were handed out. And so people are afraid to even go out onto the street or in any public place,” she said.
Because of this, her organisation is helping these women get legal support to remove their names from Ukraine’s military registration or to obtain the right documents to move abroad.
Domani is also helping to train the next generation of trans activists in public speaking, advocacy fundamentals and legal support.
At the start Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, between 1,000 and 2,000 members of Ukraine’s trans community were able to leave the country. But, many of them were human rights activists themselves, leaving a hole that needed to be filled.
To do this, Domani is helping organise two conferences in Kyiv and Lviv later in March. “Under blackouts from rocket attacks, we are trying to invest in children and train not only the trans community but also our allies,” she mentioned.
‘Standing up’ for the weather
Like many of us of her technology, Zanna Vanrenterghem first was enthusiastic about weather activism when she watched An Inconvenient Truth, a documentary spearheaded via former US vp Al Gore.
She then joined a weather activist staff in Belgium known as Climate Express sooner than turning into a challenge chief at Greenpeace Belgium – a bunch that is making an attempt to transport the rustic clear of fossil fuels.
The results of weather exchange have an increasing number of transform extra glaring in Europe, sparking increasingly folks to get considering activism. “I’ve by no means observed such a lot of folks rise up for the weather,” she instructed Euronews.
“I’ve never seen so many grandparents and young people and teens actively trying to change something.”
Over the previous 40 years, climate-related occasions have brought about greater than €487 billion in losses within the bloc, in keeping with the European Union. And previously 40 years, greater than 138,000 persons are concept to have died as a result of climate-related excessive herbal occasions in Europe.
“There are very few people that are now alive in Europe and that haven’t experienced a massive amount of heatwaves, forest fires or drought,” she added. “You just have to [loosen] the noose and see that climate change is happening, and this is affecting the livelihoods of every European to some degree.”
But, she stressed out, additionally it is essential to have an intersectional technique to weather activism.
“Our economic system is built on structural inequality, inequality between men and women, inequality between richer classes and poorer classes.
“And that structural inequality is one thing that we want to dismantle as a result of so long as that is a part of the machine, there is no manner that we will get everybody aligned to take on [climate change].
Changing attitudes in Ukraine
For many activists in Ukraine, reminiscent of Taya Gerasimova, the struggle brought about a drastic transformation in each the way in which they paintings and the general public’s attitudes in opposition to girls.
Gerasimova is likely one of the individuals of Women’s March Ukraine, a staff that continuously organised girls’s rights marches sooner than the full-scale invasion. Their primary objective on the time: getting Kyiv to ratify the Istanbul Convention, a global treaty requiring countries to actively fight home abuse
Once the struggle began, it briefly remodeled right into a humanitarian hub, responding to over 35,000 requests for support, growing 3 new shelters and serving to some 7,000 folks in finding housing out of the country.
But whilst Gerasimova described girls as “the most vulnerable group in Ukraine” – particularly if they’re caring for numerous kids, the aged or folks with disabilities – she added that she has additionally witnessed a shift in sexist attitudes during the last yr.
In 2018, 29% of folks responding to a survey via the Ukrainian NGO Insight agreed with the remark: “Women should always obey their husbands.”
In 2022, that quantity dropped to eight%. A equivalent factor took place for different questions, reminiscent of “A woman should perform all domestic work and be a good housewife in any case” – with 43% of respondents agreeing to the remark in 2018 and simply 2% doing the similar in 2022.
That exchange, in keeping with Gerasimova, is partially as a result of “women became a little bit more visible in social life [during the war]. There are a lot of women volunteers now, women joining the army and volunteering for humanitarian aid,” she mentioned.
Another reason why, she argued, is that organisers began to mention, “if we oppose Russia, we have to also oppose these old traditional values.”
And she added that as an alternative of shifting in opposition to “Russian values,” the general public must transfer in the wrong way in opposition to “gender equality and European values.”
