Happy International Women's Day!

International Women's Day was first celebrated on March 8, 1909 (well, that year it was National Women's Day), a year to the day after 15,000 women marched in the streets of New York demanding shorter work hours, better pay, voting rights, and an end to child labor. The day is an official holiday in many countries, such as those of the former Soviet Union. You can read more about its history on the IWD website.

On the first IWD of the 21st century, the UN issued this statement:

"...members of the Security Council recognize that peace is inextricably linked with equality between women and men. They affirm that the equal access and full participation of women in power structures and their full involvement in all efforts for the prevention and resolution of conflicts are essential for the maintenance and promotion of peace and security."

The UN has taken on Women's Rights, and specifically the Elimination of Violence against Women, as a major issue in the past 30 years; gender equality is one of its Millenium Development Goals. Two weeks ago, at the opening meeting of the Commission on the Status of Women, the UN Secretary-General said:

"Violence against women is an issue that cannot wait. A brief look at the statistics makes it clear. At least one out of every three women is likely to be beaten, coerced into sex or otherwise abused in her lifetime....No country, no culture, no woman young or old is immune to this scourge. Far too often, the crimes go unpunished, the perpetrators walk free."

Lest we delude ourselves into thinking that women and men live as equals in the United States in 2008, consider an article from today's Boston Globe about a professor of anesthesiology at the BI who is filing a lawsuit against the hospital, its president, and the chief of surgery, alleging years of sexist treatment (the chief of surgery reportedly told a group of nurses that he preferred to hire residents who were "tall, light-skinned, Western-taught men"), at the end of which she was demoted. And although women enter medical school at nearly the same rate as men, they are still under-represented in the upper ranks of academic medicine and in certain specialties such as neurosurgery. It would be naive to think that the dearth of full-fledged female professors in medical schools and teaching hospitals is because women haven't been entering medicine at high rates for long enough. Discrimination, both overt (like that referred to in the lawsuit against BI) and subtle, is everywhere, and the lack of female professors (of all specialties) and mentors creates a dangerous pattern of not encouraging young women to take career paths so often taken by young men after medical school. There was an interesting article in AMSA's magazine this month called Breaking into the Boys' Club. You can read it here.

Ok, enough on this (albeit interesting) topic for today. (*alights from soapbox*)
[But this is IWD, after all. If you can't rant about gender bias today, when can you??]