The United Nations describes International Women's Day celebrated on 8 March of every year as a commemoration of "the story of ordinary women as makers of history". Al-Ahram Weekly takes the occasion to reflect on the progress made in the battle to emancipate woman kind THIS WEEK, the UN celebrated 30 years of efforts to promote women's rights and gender equality. The UN Commission on the Status of Women commemorated the annual celebration of International Women's Day, observed on 8 March, by calling on representatives of governments and women's groups to meet at UN headquarters in New York to assess the progress made to eliminate discrimination and integrate women as full and equal partners in all policies and decision-making processes. The celebration coincided with meetings organised by the UN Commission on the Status of Women to review 10 years of the implementation of the Fourth World Conference on Women that convened in Beijing in 1995 and produced one of the strongest action- oriented appeals to end discrimination against women and girls in society, at the work place and at home. Delegates in New York began their meetings on 28 February with a session attended by UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan who stressed that the best way to achieve the development millennium goals was to empower women. On Tuesday, delegates met to commemorate International Women's Day. Addresses to the gathering were marked by cold realism. They acknowledged that 30 years after the convocation of the world's first women's conference in 1975 -- and 10 years after Beijing -- the rights of women and girls, be they legal, social or economic, have not made enough headway. However, they were not willing to concede defeat. Rigoberta Menchu Tum, Guatemala's Nobel Peace Prize laureate, said the New York assembly should regenerate the momentum across the world to combat discriminatory systems in all cultures that deny their women their rights and excludes them from contributing to the development of their societies. Kenyan Wangari Maathati, another Nobel Peace Prize winner, argued it did not matter how long the march would take but that eventually women should be able to access equal space and opportunity. "Everybody here sounds very determined to show more commitment to women's rights," Hanaa Sorour, head of the Women's Status Division at the Arab League, said. The issue, Sorour added, was not the determination of those present in New York but rather the ability of governmental and non-governmental bodies to raise enough awareness in societies about the discrimination to which women and girls are subjected to. Promoting the concept of "gender equality" -- at times equity as some governments in the Arab and Muslim world would argue -- is the main issue on the agenda of the New York meeting that is scheduled to last for a little over two weeks and should produce a long list of recommendations covering a wide range of rights, including the right to education, equal and/or equitable inheritance and the highly controversial right to abortion and homosexual marriage. The New York meetings also focussed on the plight of women living in conflict areas. A joint initiative by the Palestinian delegation and the Arab League dedicated a special one-hour documentary on Palestinian women in Israeli jails.
