Today is International Women Day, we celebrate women’s courage and beauty. We congratulate each other on our achievements and progress against discrimination and but, how was this day chosen?
On 8 March 1908 a New York textile factory caught on fire with the owner trapping his female workers inside to prevent them from striking with other factory workers. 129 workers died in the fire. The colors of the fabric they were working on were chosen as the symbol of the international women’s rights movement. Since 1908 women got voting rights in most countries, but unfortunately there are still textile factories in Bangladesh where women are trapped in unsafe buildings. The sad thing is that they are making clothes for women in the other part of the world who celebrate International Women Day by wearing pretty dresses. The gender equality can’t be achieved as long as we raise our girls to become princesses with lady manners.
The progress is only real when the day-to-day language bias towards girls and women has changed. ‘Determined girls are not bossy, they have leadership skills’.
On March 8th, 2019, Catalyst developed an app for correcting language bias, Try it out and see if your language needs to be corrected: https://www.catalyst.org/biascorrect/