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Philippines
Friday, March 29, 2024

Embracing equity

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We stand with 3.905 billion women, of the world’s 8.06 billion total population, as they celebrate today International Women’s Day 2023.

Themed ‘DigitALL: Innovation and technology for gender equality’ it seeks to start a conversation on not just ensuring equal opportunities but, more essentially, equity.

This global holiday, a focal point in the women’s rights movement, brings attention to issues like gender equality, reproductive rights, and violence and abuse against women.

Women human rights defenders and feminist movements use the transformative power of digital technology to connect, mobilize, and drive social change.

The word “WE” stands for “Women and Everyone” which emphasizes the role of women themselves and everyone in the pursuit of gender equality.

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It also stands for “Women’s Empowerment,” which can only be achieved when agencies, mechanisms, institutions, private partners, and duty-bearers from the national to the local level provide women equal rights and opportunities, and women take these opportunities to further themselves. With women and everyone in synergy,

This year’s celebration marks, in the Philippines, a juncture in the advancement of women’s rights as it launches a new recurring theme from this year to 2028:

“Women Empowerment” sparks a renewed commitment to the advocacy and banks on the gains achieved during the 2016-2022 theme “WE Make CHANGE Work for Women,” which stressed the need for compassionate and harmonized networks towards gender equality and women’s empowerment or GEWE.

The recurring theme also aligns with the Philippine Development Plan 2023-2028, which aims for “deep economic and social transformation to reinvigorate job creation and accelerate poverty reduction by steering the economy back on a high-growth path.”

The plan also highlights that growth must be inclusive, building an environment that provides equal opportunities to all Filipinos and equipping them with skills to participate fully in an innovative and globally competitive economy.

Thus, we begin this new era of the National Women’s Month Celebration, high in the hope and ambition that “WE are all for Gender Equality, WE are all for an inclusive society.”

Gender equality is the first half of the GEWE advocacy, and it is the ultimate goal when we advance the rights of women.

In the Global Gender Gap Report, at the current rate of progress, with the global gender gap being closed by only 68.1 percent, it will take 132 years to reach gender equality worldwide, a stark difference from the figure of 99.5 years in the 2020 report.

Hence, this means that none of us, or most likely many of our children, will see gender parity in our lifetimes.

But not all hope is gone, officials underline, because our right for gender equality today is for a better and more inclusive tomorrow, although not in the next generations.

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