Gender transformative change, here and now: Addressing the power dynamics and root causes of gender inequality
Mar 8, 2023
This 8th March, International Women's Day, PSI celebrates a turning point in the struggle for womxn[1] around the world.
It is no longer enough to talk about gender-sensitive or gender-responsive policies, we demand transformation and political actions that dismantle the structural causes of inequality.
We demand transformative change - nothing less
It is time to redress the power relations that:
Control, commodify and violate our bodies and our lives.
Devalue and make precarious our paid and unpaid work.
Privatise public services, deepening poverty and feminising it.
Mutilate nature and the commons.
Exclude us from science, technology, and the digital age.
Colonise our territories and extract our wealth.
Assault democracy, good governance, and public control.
From the Global South, Irene Khumalo, PSI World Women's Committee Chair said “We demand transformative change - nothing less. We are proud of our struggle for equality and of being part of an organisation that fights daily to provide greater responses to change and progress for womxn”.
Rosa Pavanelli, PSI General Secretary, reflects on how far the organisation has come and projects it into the present: "we started 21 years ago with a gender-parity policy in the participation in all decision-making structures of the organisation. This encouraged other political transformations like the inclusion of gender mainstreaming in the 2017 PSI Programme of Action, thereby making the work for gender equality the political responsibility of all, not only womxn.
Now”, continues Pavanelli, "we advocate for a five-pronged gender-transformative proposal for change that encompasses the world of work, public services, the digital age, and womxn’s lives, by:
Rebuilding the social organisation of care, in line with our 5Rs manifesto.
Reclaiming public services as a means of transforming unequal gender relations, starting with the strengthening of care systems and the construction of a model for addressing the sexual and reproductive rights of womxn in public health.
Exercising womxn’s trade union rights and demanding the right to organise, bargain, and strike to revalue work and eradicate violence.
Calling for a gender-transformative digital new deal.
Acting against feminicide and calling for state policies to combat it.”
[1] The term WOMXN includes intersectional diversity and feminised identities.