The Great Debate UK
Sarah Brown calls for action against maternal mortality
Sarah Brown is Global Patron of the White Ribbon Alliance and author of Behind the Black Door published by Ebury Publishing on March 3, 2011. Follow her on Twitter @SarahBrownUK The opinions expressed are her own. Thomson Reuters will host an International Women’s Day follow-the-sun live blog on March 8, 2011.
To mark the 100th International Women’s Day it is as good a place as any to start with U.N. Women’s objective to seek a pathway to decent work for women.
Back in 1911, the very first International Women’s Day was held to protest unfair wages and poor conditions of work for women. Today, much of the focus lies similarly in seeking equal treatment, repairing injustices and opening up the opportunity for women to improve their lives in the poorest parts of the world.
As U.N. Women’s Executive Director Michele Bachelet said just last week, “Women’s strength, women’s industry, women’s wisdom are humankind’s greatest untapped resource”.
As we aim also to tackle the great injustice of high maternal mortality and to improve infant and child survival and health, we should draw on all that women have to offer.
So let’s find a way to put more women in to dignified work and simultaneously reach towards a great unmet need. That need is more trained health workers – 3.5 million of them in fact.
Sarah Brown on Ada Lovelace Day
- Sarah Brown is the wife of British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, a charity campaigner and Twitter enthusiast. Follow her on Twitter @SarahBrown10. The opinions expressed are her own. -
On the 8th of March, the web lit up with blogs and tweets and facebook messages to mark International Women’s Day. I joined thousands of women on London’s Millennium Bridge as part of a global effort to unite women to serve the causes of peace and development and was very pleased to discuss our shared aspirations for women with U.S. First Lady Michelle Obama in a web exclusive for Number 10.
But somehow one day doesn’t seem enough to reflect on what women have achieved, and on how far we still have to travel along the road to equality. So we have extended International Women’s Day to a whole month of focus on gender at Downing Street and today I’m blogging for Reuters in honour of Ada Lovelace Day.
You might not have heard of Ada – but you wouldn’t be reading this without her. Everybody knows about the fathers of computing – people like Charles Babbage and Alan Turing – but it’s time to celebrate the mothers too.
Ada Lovelace was one of the first ever computer programmers and Ada Lovelace Day (tagged as #ALD10 on Twitter) is our chance to draw attention both to what she achieved, and to the women who stand on her shoulders today.
I have been thrilled to discover a full length portrait of Ada hanging in No 10 and was very pleased to help host more than 100 of Britain’s most inspirational women at a reception last week with her gazing down upon us.
Another woman who deserves to be famous for her contribution to technology is Hedy Lamarr – an Austrian-born American actress and engineer.
Rightly famous for her film career, she also co-invented an early form of spread spectrum communications technology (the basis for WiFi networks and ADSL).
