‘It’s everyone’s duty to fight for women’s rights’

STANDING TOGETHER: A man shows his support at a women’s rights demonstration. Picture by Aiden Frazier

The Accidental Diplomat, a column by Paul Knott

Winning the global struggle for women’s rights is in everybody’s interests

In the wake of International Women’s Day on 8th March, the news from Afghanistan to Luhansk, Louisiana and London shows that the global struggle for women’s rights remains unfinished. Sexism is still one of the biggest obstacles blocking progress that would benefit us all.

Even so, I still briefly, and foolishly, wondered whether a middle-aged bloke such as myself was the best placed person to write about this subject. Those doubts were dispelled by the recent support shown by our rugby league clubs, Hull FC and Hull KR for the White Ribbon UK campaign against violence against women and girls, as reported in The Hull Story. As with all issues of abuse and discrimination, it is the people from the group containing most of the perpetrators, in this case men, who have the greatest responsibility to speak up and the most opportunities to tackle it.

Worldwide, Afghanistan and Iran currently present some of the starkest examples of sexist oppression. Since returning to power in Afghanistan, the Taliban have forced almost the entire female population into a form of house arrest. They are preventing Afghan women and girls from working or going to school, or even leaving their homes without being fully covered head to toe and accompanied by a male relative.

In Iran, the murder of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini by the security forces after she was arrested for wearing her headscarf incorrectly has sparked a female-led revolt against the country’s male-dominated dictatorship. The brave protestors have exposed the brutal lengths to which these authoritarian men will go to exert control over how Iranian women behave, where they go and how they dress. Horrifyingly, girl’s schools in Iran are now suffering a series of apparent poison gas attacks.

These are the most extreme cases but there are plenty of issues in other countries. Growing numbers of girls in Nigeria are not being sent to school due to discrimination and a lack of funding. In some parts of the country, there is also the fear of schoolgirls being kidnapped by terrorist gangs.

SOLIDARITY: A demonstration following the murder of Mahsa Amini in Iran. Picture by Neil Webb

Nor should Westerners deceive themselves that aggressive sexism and discrimination are problems that only plague “less developed” faraway places. Recent events closer to home are more than enough to banish any such notion.

On our own continent of Europe, following the grim precedents set during World War II and the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s, Russian soldiers are committing sickening war crimes by subjecting Ukrainian women to mass rape and sexual violence.

In the USA, about half of the states have now either banned or are in the process of banning abortion, removing American women’s right to choose what to do with their own bodies. This campaign is in large part driven by powerful men aggressively seeking to control women even in the most difficult and personal of circumstances, such as when they are victims of rape or their lives are endangered by proceeding with the pregnancy. 

Meanwhile in Britain, we have all seen the shocking recent series of cases of sexual assault, rape and murder committed by serving members of the Metropolitan Police force, the very people who are supposed to protect the public. A poisonous wider culture of violent sexism within the Met has also been revealed. This environment enabled the perpetrators to persist in committing their abhorrent crimes for so long.

Other non-violent forms of discrimination may be less viscerally distressing but still have a serious impact on people’s lives. Most countries, including the UK, have a poor record on enforcing equal pay for equal work or ensuring fair representation between men and women, whether in business, public organisations or politics.

REMEMBRANCE AND PROTEST: Members of Say Her Name Hull hold a vigil last May to remember female victims of male violence in the UK. Another vigil will be held next week

On politics, I am almost tempted to make the potentially patronising argument that it would always be preferable to have women instead of men as leaders. That would at least rid us of the worst emitters of toxic masculinity such as Trump and Putin, who cause so much misery in the world. In reality, the picture is more nuanced and dependent on individual personal qualities than any supposedly universal female characteristics.

To take Britain’s experiences as an example, our female Prime Ministers, Margaret Thatcher, Theresa May and Liz Truss have been a mixed blessing, at best, as have most of their recent male counterparts. But other senior figures such as the former Speaker of Parliament, Betty Boothroyd, were undeniably more successful. And elsewhere, over the last few years, leaders such as Germany’s Angela Merkel, Tanzania’s Samia Suluhu Hassan, New Zealand’s Jacinda Ahern and Taiwan’s Tsai Ing-wen have calmly handled crises facing their nations with an impressive combination of empathy and decisiveness.

All of which brings us back to the main points. For any job up to and including top political leadership, individual women are clearly at least as likely as individual men to be up to the task. Discriminating against the 50 per cent of the population who are female deprives a country of 50 per cent of its potential talent, which, in turn, cuts its chances of solving its problems by half.  

Indeed, this basic maths may be an underestimate. United Nations’ research shows that countries with high levels of gender equality also tend to have strong, democratic institutions, including low levels of corruption, a free media and fair, independent legal systems. This makes such places more likely to be prosperous, peaceful and have good relations with their neighbours. Based on this knowledge, some countries such as Sweden have sought to pursue a “feminist foreign policy”, promoting ideas of equality as a means to create a more peaceful and secure world. These ideas are certainly worth supporting.

Creating fair and successful countries ultimately depends on all of us in our own communities being committed to basic justice and decency. This requires men to fight – as much, if not more than, women – for the rights of our mothers, sisters and daughters to have equal opportunities, to live free from violence and to make their own decisions about their own bodies. We can do this by speaking out and standing up against sexism and violence whenever we hear or see it, and by supporting politicians who will enforce regulations against abuse and discrimination. And we should do this because building better societies by winning the worldwide struggle for women’s rights is in everybody’s interests.

• Say Her Name Hull will hold a vigil to remember women killed by men in the UK at 7pm on Thursday, March 16 in Queen Victoria Square