On March 8, we will celebrate the 100th anniversary of International Women's Day (IWD). On this day and for the duration of the week, the Tri-City Transitions Society invites you to celebrate the achievements attained worldwide in the area of women's rights and to reflect upon the important work that must still be done.
The global theme for this year's IWD, set by the United Nations, is "equal access to education, training and science and technology: pathway to decent work for women." It is a theme that highlights the crucial connection between the economic health of the nation and the social, political and economic health of its women.
In Canada, the strides in women's education and women's rights over the past century have been substantial. Status of Women Canada boasts that women make up the majority of full-time students in most university faculties, that the current government has the highest percentage of women in cabinet in Canadian history and that women's employment has risen to 74.3% in the last decade alone.
The contributions of Canadian women over the course of the past century in both the arts and the sciences are impressive. From Elsie Gregory McGill's accomplishments in the field of aeronautical engineering to Margaret Newton's word renown work on grain rust and Ursula Franklin's humanitarian interventions in the world of science, the last 100 years have shown how enriched Canadian society can be by the meaningful work and involvement of our women.
This communal and global value of women's education is acknowledged poignantly in the old Chinese saying: "To plan for a day, catch a fish; to plan for a year, plant rice; to plan for a decade, plant a tree; but to plan for a lifetime, educate a girl."
But research has shown that Canadian women have had to overcome overwhelming personal and professional obstacles to make their contributions, and that to this day, they not only hold few positions of power in the sciences but are also still under-represented in fields such as mathematics or engineering.
Even more troubling is that while statistics Canada has identified a direct correlation between a woman's education level and her chance of employment, it has simultaneously discovered that - education or no education - Canadian women were still less likely than Canadian men to find work. When they do find work, Canadian women also typically make only 66% of what men make in similar positions. This is no staggering improvement over women's percentage of men's earnings in 1917, which hovered between 50 and 80%.
It is gaps such as these that social services infrastructure is called upon to fill. As the 2010 CEDAW Report Card has shown, however, B.C. is still floundering in its attempts to support women's rights and the services that protect those rights. The province received two failing grades for its cuts to social assistance and legal aid, a D+ for its inadequate support of low-income and social housing, and a C+ for its management of the intractable problem of violence against women and girls.
"Women experiencing violence continue to fall into the gaps in services," the report concludes, highlighting the need for adequate funding to and support of overstretched community resources.
Let this year's International Women's Day be an occasion on which we recognize our capacity for change, acknowledge our responsibility to offer support where it is needed and renew our commitment to achieving equality for all women, in all aspects of their lives.
CELEBRATE MARCH 8
In its continued frontline support of women's rights, the Tri-City Transitions Society invites you to join its celebration of women's achievements on March 8 at the Evergreen Cultural Centre in Coquitlam from noon to 2 p.m., and at the ACT Theatre in Maple Ridge from 3:30 to 5:30 p.m.
Irena Pochop is with Tri-City Transitions Society (formerly Tri-City Women's Resource Society).
