Happy IWD

Today is International Woman's Day. It is the day when we should reflect on the rights that women across the globe are still struggling to attain. Simple rights like the right to life;  to be educated; to have control over your own body; to have a job commensurate with your skills and experience and to be paid accordingly; to wear what you like not what you dad, husband or priest tells you. If you believe in these kinds of equalities, you are a feminist.  Because whatever others would have you believe, feminism is not about hating men or wearing dungarees or knitting your own muesli. It is about equality  and justice pure and simple. Just because biology dictates that we are the ones that have the children, it shouldn't automatically relegate us to second class citizenry.

While in Britain we are not living under the heavy yoke of oppression that women in other parts of the world are having to bear, be in no doubt we still have a long way to go. Power is not evenly divided, not even close. Where are the women in public life? In politics? In the judiciary? In the board room? In the City? Yes, there we can name a few examples in each, but it is just a few. If there were more, a lot more, I think life (for men and women) might be a bit fairer.

Today is also the day we should celebrate the achievements of women, the women who have blazed a path to make our lives (men's and women's) better. Here are a few of the women who have influenced me and made my life better (in no particular order):

• Rosa Parks, civil rights leader
• Albertina Sisulu, one of the great leaders of the apartheid struggle
• Josephine Baker, jazz diva, civil rights activist, persistent breaker of barriers
• Beatrice Webb, social reformer and founder of the LSE
• Millicent Garrett Fawcett, early feminist and suffragist 
• Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, the first woman in Britain to qualify as a doctor, early feminist and suffragist,  sister of Millicent
• Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughters Christabel and Sylvia, suffrage activists
• Sojourner Truth, former slave, minister and women's activist
• Mary Wollstonecraft, the mother of feminism
• Jane Austen, creator of Lizzie Bennett and so many more remarkably strong women
• Margaret Atwood, novelist and poet, if you haven't read The Handmaiden's Tale do so immediately
• Simone de Beauvoir, feminist and existentialist
• Eleanor Roosevelt, so much more than the First Lady, a social reformer, champion of the rights of women and civil rights for African Americans and Japanese Americans, the first Chair of the UN Commission on Human Rights, overseeing the drafting of the UN Declaration of Human Rights
• Navi Pillay, the UN High Commissioner on Human Rights, the first non-white woman to open her own law practice in South Africa, the first non-white woman to serve as a judge in South Africa, a judge and then President of the International Criminal Tribunal on Rwanda where she established that rape and sexual assault could constitute acts of genocide before being appointed as a judge to the International Criminal Court in The Hague. She is also very funny and my aunt
• Adelaide Joseph, my mother who fought the fight for women's rights in apartheid South Africa and who together with my feminist father taught me and my sisters not to let our gender limit our ambitions or lives 

So woman or man, spend some time today thinking about what you can do to close the gender gap and about the women who have helped to make you who you are. 

Syria: enough already

You might not have seen it what with all the reporting of the fact that 2012 was very wet (who knew?) and the Argentinians deciding that it was about time that it reminded the world that it has a claim on the Falkland Islands (I am afraid I just can’t get excited about this), but last night the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights reported that in the period 15 March 2011 and 30 November 2012 more than 60,000 people had been killed in Syria by both sides. More than 60,000 – it is truly staggering.

And let’s be clear, these are not mickey mouse figures based on hunches or the claims of the opposing sides but based on five months of analysis by independent experts who have only counted people for whom they have a first and last name and a date and location of the death.  So no exaggeration, rather supreme caution. As the High Commissioner’s spokesperson chillingly put it “There are many names not on the list for people who were quietly shot in the woods”.

And what have we been doing while 60,000 people were killed? Well, pretty much nothing. We had effectively been twiddling our thumbs while the country burns.  The Human Rights Commissioner Navi Pillay warned that thousands more would die if the conflict continued and if we failed to prepare for the inevitable instability that will occur when it finally does. She called for serious planning “not just to provide humanitarian aide to all those who need it, but to protect all Syrian citizens from extrajudicial killings and acts for revenge.”

And she’s right. We have been here before haven’t we? Somalia, Iraq, DRC, Afghanistan. But with well-planned strategic support from the international community, post-conflict mayhem can be avoided. Just think of Sierra Leone, Liberia, Rwanda, Mozambique.

Now, I don’t pretend to know what the solution to the crisis in Syria other than it must in the end come from the Syrians themselves. But I do know if we fail to heed to words of the wise Ms Pillay 60,000 dead will seem small.