This month, the world saw its 116th celebration of International Women’s Day, and many are asking if the topic of equal rights for women is still even a necessary conversation to be had. In most aspects of the Western world, women have the same rights as any man. However, we still have a long way to go as a global culture to ensure that all women are seen as equal when compared to men. Femicide is still an extremely prevalent issue across the world. According to a study done by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, about 50,000 women globally were victims of gender-related murder. About 45% of these women lived in Africa, 35% in Asia, 15% in the Americas, 4% in Europe, and 0.6% in Oceania. Femicide is often an extreme result of abuse stemming from the harmful idea that women must be submissive to the men in their lives and homes. This abuse may escalate if the woman attempts to flee the situation or fight back, escalating into physical abuse and, in extreme cases, murder.
It should also be noted that across the world, many women still do not have the same rights as men. UN Women shared some horrifying statistics ahead of International Women’s Day this year. The press release stated that globally, women have merely 64% of the legal rights as men do. This can translate into weak rape and domestic violence laws, no equal right to the same wage as a man for the same work and young girls being forced into marriages to much older men in nearly 75% of the world. In her 1981 presentation at the National Women’s Studies Association Conference entitled “The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism,” American activist and professor Audre Lorde asserts that “I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own.” Intersectionality is a critical part of feminism. In order to assure that all women are equal to men, we must consider women of different races, sexualities and potential disabilities all over the world, not just the ones who relate most to our own experiences. The patriarchal society we live in has taught girls from a young age to view each other as competition, from superficial qualities like who has the best wardrobe or prettiest hair, to who can “girlboss” the hardest. However, if we are ever going to make any sort of change, we must reject this notion and support each other. While Western society has embraced (albeit a sanitized version of) girlhood as a cultural movement in recent years, it would be ignorant at best and bigoted at worst to forsake women in other parts of the world whose femininity and expression is still punished. We are stronger together than we are alone, and only as a group can we dismantle these cultural systems built on the notion that women are inferior and free our sisters from their shackles.