International Women’s Day! Progress Made? Maybe not….

Wednesday was this year’s International Women’s Day and in my daily post on the Dublin Event Guide Facebook Page I wrote

“The focus of the day is in some regions a celebration of respect, appreciation and love towards women for their economic, political and social achievements and in other regions there is a strong political and human rights focus.
We are lucky that the position of women in our society is a lot better than in other countries. But “better” is not the same as “good”! The onus is on us (men and women!) to demand (and provide) fairness and equal opportunities.”

So we have to question/check how far we really came, because it is easy to convince yourself that WE don’t have any problems only others have problems.

Well, a former Dublin Event Guide reader who now lives in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) wrote on Facebook that all women in her job got a voucher equivalent to EUR 100 for some treatment. She would have liked to get a massage, but it turned out that only invasive beauty treatments (fillers, botox, etc) would be covered. Shocking! So the assumption must have been by the person/organisation giving the gift that all women want/need some invasive beauty treatment.

“Well, it is UAE, what do you expect!” some might think, but then on Friday Newstalk posted on Facebook that Sean Moncrieff was very unhappy with what the newspaper wrote about Amal Clooney. Amal Clooney is a human rights solicitor who addressed the United Nations (UN) last week about some serious issues regarding Iraq and ISIS. Not something most of us do regularly and she must have worked (and probably fought) hard to get to that position. Amal Clooney also happens to be George Clooney’s wife and it seems that she is pregnant. So what do the UK newspapers like The Sun,The Express, Daily Mail, The Mirror and Vogue write about? They commented on nothing else but her “baby bump” and her “chic dress”. Watch that shocking video clip here: www.facebook.com/newstalkfm/videos/10155966083037907/ So, we THINK we came far in our Western civilised world!? We are not much ahead of the countries we look down to! :-(