The Great Debate UK

Glass ceiling remains unbreakable by all but a few

- Lindsey Nefesh-Clarke is the founder of Women’s Worldwide Web – an online charitable organisation designed to help empower women with access to micro-finance loans, education, mentoring and networking. She has an MBA from ESCP Europe Business School and is a Board Director of Enfants d’Asie. The opinions expressed are her own. Reuters will host a “follow-the-sun” live blog on Monday, March 8, 2010, International Women’s Day. Please tune in. -

As an educated European woman enjoying a fulfilling career, along with the majority of my female and male peers, the “angel in the house” curse and the “feminine mystique” malaise seem, in many ways, to have faded into history.

My peers and I can read the inspiring headlines “We did it” , knowing that women will soon constitute the majority of the U.S. workforce, knowing that there are nowadays more female than male university graduates in the U.S. and Europe, and that an increasing number of high-profile female role models are heading some of the world’s leading companies.

The courageous feminist struggles of our foremothers are not to be forgotten.  But, in our new, post-industrial world, haven’t most of the critical legal and social battles for women like me been won?  Isn’t it self-indulgent to bash on about the need to persist in the struggle for women’s empowerment and gender equality when my ostensible juggling act is to type a memo on my BlackBerry with one hand and operate the microwave with the other?

This International Women’s Day, I will be celebrating the heroism, resilience, resourcefulness, creativity and achievements of women worldwide, today and throughout history.  Progress in women’s socioeconomic status over the past century has been monumental.

And yet, as we assess the hard-won accomplishments of women around the globe, one year before the centenary of International Women’s Day and following the 30th anniversary of the landmark Convention on the Elimination of All forms of Discrimination against Women, I can’t help asking whether this year’s International Women’s Day is less a cause for celebration and more a moment for sadness and acute concern.

Some facts: approximately 1.3 billion people live in absolute poverty and the majority of them are women; women work two-thirds of the world’s working hours but earn only one-tenth of the world’s income and own less than one-tenth of the world’s property ; nearly a billion people in the world are illiterate and two thirds of them are women; it is estimated that a woman dies every minute as a result of problems in pregnancy and childbirth, mostly in the global South, and the vast majority are preventable; one in three women worldwide is beaten, coerced into sex or otherwise abused ; it is estimated that 100 million females are missing from the planet as a result of sex-selective abortion, discriminatory nutrition and health care in childhood and routine violence against women, a “gendercide” that « far exceeds the number of people who were slaughtered in all the genocides of the 20th century » .