“International Women’s Day is our opportunity
to reflect as women on how far we have come and what more we need to do to make
sure women everywhere have the opportunity to write their own story.
Changing the world, like living your own life well, requires a sense of
purpose, the courage to pursue it and the preparedness to risk the most public
of failures. Nothing big was ever achieved by cowering.”
–
Hon. Julia Gillard, 27th Prime Minister of Australia.
Madam Julia Gillard generously shared these words on the eve of
International Women’s Day on 7th March 2013 at Canberra in
Australia. She wanted to communicate the message of empowerment of women on a
day on which much more needs to be done than to just say that men and women are
alike. As Australia’s first female Prime Minister and a law student, Julia believed
that she had much more in her bags than just documents or few copies of
affidavits. She had a dream to courageously spread the message across the world
that women at every stage are as strong and resilient as men. She is one who
stepped out of her comfort zone many times, which made her a role model. But,
the sad part of the story is that there aren’t many successors to Julia. There
aren’t many women to sit at the decision making tables.
With women occupying just 17% Fortune 500 board seats, only 19% of
parliament seats worldwide, earning less than 10% of world’s income and forming
only 22% of the workforce across the world, the gender gap is still far too broad.
Women start careers in business and other professions with the same level of
intelligence, education, dedication and commitment as men. Yet comparatively
few reach the top echelons. There’s been a lot of talk in the past about why more
women don’t become leaders and what our society needs to change to produce more
female leaders.
It’s a fact that if we account the amount of work women do at
their homes, our economy will triple. The world has been successful in
developing women leaders who lead a team as big as 10,000 or more workforce. We
must appreciate them because they are the ones who took a brave decision to
deal with their life in somewhat different way than others of their breed. But
the number of these women is very less.
I have always considered ‘women’ as those creations of God, who
are bravest at heart to love, strongest enough to rejoice and wisest enough to
understand.
To bring a change, we need to change to change the mindset. We can
achieve this through enlightenment and education. We need to design our
curriculum and workplace in such a way that it should not discriminate against
women, rather it should welcome them. On the occasion of International Women’s
Day, let us appreciate the efforts of Women on humanity and pledge to make this
world a harmonious place for them to live.
