by Nadia Ramoutar MMM Communications Coordinator                 Ireland                   08.03.2025

It would make me so happy if we didn’t need to have another International Women’s Day. If things were going so much better for women that we could say “Oh, no need. Let’s not have it this year.” Unfortunately, the opposite is true. The theme this year “Accelerate Action” makes total sense. It’s not enough for us to “celebrate” women when so many women in the world are unjustly suffering. At the rate we are going, women are actually falling further behind even though we make up 51% of the world’s population.

According to Focus 2030’s research “at the current rate of progress, it will take 131 years to achieve gender equality worldwide.” Clearly, this statistic is beyond the current life expectancy of any human so none of us will be here to see if it is right. We seem to be playing on an uneven field where the goals just continue to move further away. In any category we select, women are generally doing worse. Education, health, violence, poverty… over and over we see that women are struggling globally to survive, let alone thrive.

What is also sad is that when a woman suffers, it is usually children that will also suffer. We have entire generations of children who will experience extreme poverty, starvation and even die from dehydration because their mother never stood a chance to make ends meet. At so many levels our MMM missions work to empower women and families so that they can be sustainably fed and keep themselves. The old phrase “give me a fish and I eat for a day, teach me to fish and I can eat for a lifetime” is the logic in creating a way to treat the entire woman and prepare her.

We have not found a way to correct for the injustice of gender inequality in the world, but we cannot give up hope in finding a way to do it. International Women’s Day is a way to remind people that the issues facing working women globally are still dire. It is not a way of saying that women deserve more than men, but to ask for efforts towards equity. For many of us working in this realm the ways of the world at the moment seem to make things seem even more grim.

The challenge here is to carry hope in our hearts and put that into action. We have to do something rather than throw up our hands and shrug. We are standing on the shoulders of giants in terms of efforts to empower women since the pioneering years of the MMMs. We will acknowledge International Women’s Day this year by standing up yet again and saying “yes, you can count us in.”