MARCH 8, 2017 marks International Women’s Day (IWD). It’s a global day celebrating the social, economic, cultural and political achievements of women. Each year there is a new theme and this year’s is #BeBoldForChange. Worldwide, men and women are being called upon to help forge a better working world - a more gender inclusive world.
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So if you believe that International Women’s Day is some new-fangled event organised by women hell-bent on stirring the possum and whingeing about their lot in life, think again.
The earliest observance was held on February 28, 1909 in New York. In August 1910, an International Women’s Conference was organised in Copenhagen. The outcome was a proposal to establish an annual International Woman’s Day (singular). One hundred women from 17 countries agreed with the idea as a strategy to promote equal rights, including women’s right to vote.
In many countries, it took a long time for women to get suffrage, notwithstanding these early efforts. New Zealand was first cab off the rank in 1893, followed closely by Australia. Australian women - with the exception of Aboriginal women - won the vote in 1902, but it took years before they stood as candidates in government elections.
IWD was marked for the first time on March 19, 1911 by over a million people in Austria, Denmark, Germany and Switzerland. All over the western world, women pressed for the right to vote and to stand for parliament.
The US finally began allowing women to vote in 1920, after the ratification of the 19th Amendment to the Constitution. In 1921, a leading suffragette, Edith Cowan, was the first woman to be elected to an Australian parliament when she won a seat in the Western Australian Legislative Assembly.
In August 1943, 22 years after Cowan was elected, Australia finally elected women to Australia’s Federal Parliament when Dorothy Tangney became Senator for Western Australia and Enid Lyons was elected to the House of Representatives.
It took until 2016 for the first Aboriginal woman to be elected to the Australian House of Representatives, when Linda Burney won the federal seat of Barton in the 2016 federal election. She was also the first Aboriginal graduate from the Mitchell College of Advanced Education Bathurst (now Charles Sturt University) where she obtained a Diploma of Teaching.
Women in South Africa only got the right to vote in 1994. In Saudi Arabia, King Abdullah issued a decree in 2011 ordering that women be allowed to stand as candidates and vote in municipal elections, but their first opportunity did not come until December 2015, almost a year after the king’s death in January.
Today, the event is sponsored by the United Nations and has been since 1977.
I joined my first International Women’s Day march on International Women’s Day 1975 in Sydney when I was an optimistic young student at the University of Sydney. While some progress has been made, not nearly enough has occurred.
The national gender pay gap is currently 16.2 per cent and has hovered between 15pc and 19pc for two decades. The World Economic Forum predicts the gender gap won’t close entirely until 2186. It will take the hearts and minds of committed women and men worldwide to accelerate progress.