A day for the better half

International Women's Day is celebrated on March 8 every year as a national holiday by countries across the globe, with women often given flowers and gifts - and there are events in major cities worldwide.... In 2001, the internationalwomensday.com platform was launched to reignite attention for the day, celebrate women's achievements and continue to call for gender parity....

Covid-19 has stalled progress towards achieving gender parity. It will take 132 years to close the global gender gap, at the current rate of progress, according to the World Economic Forum's Global Gender Gap Index. That's a four-year improvement on the 2021 estimate of 136 years to parity, but still a generation of progress has been lost since 2020, when the gender gap was set to close within 100 years.

The index benchmarks 146 countries across four key dimensions (Economic Participation and Opportunity, Educational Attainment, Health and Survival and Political Empowerment) and tracks progress towards closing gender gaps over time. Of the four gaps tracked, Political Empowerment remains the largest, with only 22% closed - and having widened since 2020 by 2.4 percentage points.


The gender gap in Economic Participation and Opportunity remained the second largest of the gaps, with only 58% closed so far. The pandemic and the cost-of-living crisis is having a disproportionate impact on women....

From 'International Women's Day: What is It and Why Do We Need It?', World Economic Forum